Authored by Jason Nelson via decrypt.co,
In brief
200 protesters marched from Anthropic to OpenAI and xAI offices in San Francisco.
Activists called on AI companies to pause development of new frontier AI models.
Organizer Michael Trazzi previously staged a multi-week hunger strike outside Google DeepMind.
Protesters took to the streets of San Francisco on Saturday, stopping outside the offices of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI to call for a conditional pause in the development of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence.
According to Stop the AI Race founder and documentarian Michael Trazzi, roughly 200 protesters participated in the demonstration.
Participants included researchers, academics, and members of advocacy groups such as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, PauseAI, QuitGPT, StopAI, and Evitable.
“There are a lot of people who care about this risk from advanced AI systems,” Trazzi told Decrypt. “Having everyone marching together shows people are not isolated in thinking about this by themselves. There are a lot of people who care about this.”
The march began at noon outside Anthropic’s offices, then moved to OpenAI and then to xAI. At each stop, activists and speakers from the participating organizations addressed protesters.
According to Trazzi, the protest aimed to push AI companies to agree to a coordinated pause in building more powerful AI models and create treaties with AI developers in other countries to do the same.
“If China and the U.S. agreed to stop building more dangerous models, they could focus on making the systems better for us, like medical AI,” he said. “Everyone would be better off.”
Stop the AI Race’s proposal calls for companies to stop building new frontier models and shift work toward safety, if other major labs "credibly do the same," which Trazzi said makes protesting in front of AI labs’ offices more important.
The protest is the latest in a series of efforts to disrupt AI development.
In March 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter demanding a moratorium on further enhancements to the leading AI tool following the public launch of ChatGPT the year before.
Signers included xAI founder Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen. Since then, the “Pause Giant AI Experiments” open letter has garnered over 33,000 signatures.
In September, Trazzi staged a week-long hunger strike outside Google DeepMind’s London offices, while Guido Reichstadter held a parallel hunger strike outside Anthropic’s San Francisco offices.
Government officials and supporters of continued AI development argue that slowing research in the U.S. could give competitors abroad an advantage.
Last week, the Trump Administration published its AI framework to establish a national standard for laws governing AI development. The White House framed it as a commitment to “winning the AI race.”
“Even if you’re in China or any country in the world, nobody wants systems they cannot control,” Trazzi said. “Because we’re in this race between companies and countries to build the systems as fast as possible, we’re taking shortcuts and cutting corners on safety. There is a race that has no winners. What we have is a system we cannot control, and that’s why it’s called a suicide race.”
But even if AI developers agreed to pause development, verifying it may be easier said than done. Trazzi suggested one way to verify a pause would be to limit the computing power used to train new models.
“If you limit how much compute a company can use to build these systems, then you’re pretty much limiting developing new models,” he said.
Following the San Francisco protest, Trazzi said additional demonstrations could take place in other locations where major AI companies operate.
“We want to show up where the employees are,” he said. “We want to talk to them, and we want them to talk to their leadership and have things moving from inside,” adding that whistleblowers will have some amount of power because “they’re the ones building it.”
OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI did not immediately respond to Decrypt's requests for comment.