Do workers view AI as a threat or an opportunity for their jobs? Do such views matter for relevant public policies to regulate or govern AI's use in the workplace? The rapid advancement of AI models and their deployment has raised the substantive and theoretical importance of these questions. We use new data from a large cross-national European sample to address these questions. In addition to testing the increasingly standard approaches focusing on objective occupational AI exposure as a predictor of AI perceptions and policy views, for the former, we pose several distinct non-task oriented predictors of AI perceptions. These are: education (via cognitive resources to adapt), psychological confidence, and contextual factors. We find that education and psychological confidence are strongly correlates of AI occupational "optimism," and that the causal role of AI concern (by priming AI consideration) does increase support for regulatory policy to govern AI in expected directions.