In what became the largest demonstration against the development of AI in American history, approximately 350 protesters rallied at the headquarters of OpenAI before marching on the offices of Google DeepMind and Anthropic on Saturday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While previous protests outside OpenAI\u2019s headquarters in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco resulted in arrests and criminal charges, Saturday afternoon\u2019s peaceful demonstration saw no confrontation with police as the San Francisco Police Department cleared streets for the marching crowd.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The demonstration, dubbed \u201cThe AI Protest,\u201d was organized by a broad coalition of anti-AI organizations and labor groups, including Stop The AI Race, QuitGPT, AI Action, PauseAI, Evitable and Stop AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAI poses an existential threat to humanity; it will only get smarter and almost certainly more powerful than us,\u201d said Stop The AI Race founder Micha\u0451l Trazzi. \u201cWe might all die.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trazzi, one of the main organizers of Saturday\u2019s protest, is a former AI researcher who embarked on a hunger strike in September 2025 outside Google\u2019s DeepMind office. In March, Trazzi organized the first \u201cStop the AI Race Protest,\u201d drawing dozens of residents to the streets and setting the stage for Saturday\u2019s mass mobilization.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Attendees shared Trazzi\u2019s belief that the unrestricted development of artificial intelligence by \u201cfrontier labs\u201d such as OpenAI and Anthropic may eventually result in the creation of artificial superintelligence, or ASI \u2014 a technology fundamentally more intelligent than any human.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While ASI does not currently exist, activists such as longtime Berkeley resident Paul Sas, who said he had been a part of the anti-AI movement for \u201cdecades,\u201d worry that frontier labs are currently developing the techniques to make superintelligent AI a reality.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven now, we don\u2019t understand (AI), and that\u2019s because it\u2019s the most powerful technology we\u2019ve ever built,\u201d Sas said. \u201cIt would be pretty easy for something like that to overpower us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The protest commenced at noon outside OpenAI headquarters, before marchers snaked up by Oracle Park and descended on Downtown San Francisco to rally outside Anthropic and Google DeepMind.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The crowd was jovial as organizers handed out free slushies and a brass band marched with song and dance. Leaders from the various participating anti-AI organizations carried large signs calling for a moratorium on AI development, while attendees called out AI CEOs Sam Altman and Dario Amodei.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOne, two, three, four, we don\u2019t want a robot war,\u201d marchers chanted. \u201cFive, six, seven, eight, no AI surveillance state.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the demonstration centered on potential human extinction at the hands of an all-powerful AI, organizers said they wanted the march to be lively and hopeful, reflecting values the movement hopes to safeguard.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are about protecting humanity,\u201d said Stop The AI Race organizer Caitlin Yardley. \u201cThis movement needs to prioritize joy and community; we can see it here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alongside the hardcore anti-ASI hawks, many protesters expressed concern over the short-term material impacts of AI, such as threats to domestic labor markets. Protesters said they are already feeling the impact of AI in San Francisco, as many tech employers have recently initiated mass layoffs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Incoming UC Berkeley junior Sophie Bucker expressed concern that AI has automated away human creativity and art.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to bring back human-made slop,\u201d Bucker said. \u201cThere is something to be said about the struggle to create. Slop is a part of that struggle, and now we outsource all of that to AI.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
At 2 p.m., protesters wound their way through the SoMa neighborhood of SF, stopping to rally and hear speeches outside Anthropic and DeepMind, before reaching Rincon Park on the Bay at 3 p.m. for a post-protest party stocked with pizza and drinks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The crowd was bolstered by a large group of social media influencers from plzdontkillus, an experimental 30-day conference in Berkeley for content creators concerned about AI. Tor Parsons, a YouTube creator with about 274,000 subscribers, helped to hold a banner at the front of the crowd.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of us believe that there\u2019s a world in which we have friendly AI, in which AI really does grow alongside humanity and ends up being a force for good,\u201d Parsons said. \u201cThat\u2019s just not the world we\u2019re in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sam Grotenstein contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In what became the largest demonstration against the development of AI in American history, approximately 350 protesters rallied…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,53429,53,25,31002,53423,3261,53435,53431,7543,53421,53434,157,965,53422,53430,53432,53428,53437,370,969,53426,53433,53436,53424,34427,53427,53439,53438,53425,5120,1928],"class_list":["post-102956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-action","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-berkeley","tag-caitlin-yardley","tag-dario-amodei","tag-downtown-san-francisco","tag-evitable","tag-google-deepmind","tag-michal-trazzi","tag-mission-bay","tag-openai","tag-oracle-park","tag-paul-sas","tag-pauseai","tag-plzdontkillus","tag-quitgpt","tag-rincon-park","tag-sam-altman","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-police-department","tag-sf","tag-soma","tag-sophie-bucker","tag-stop-ai","tag-stop-the-ai-race","tag-stop-the-ai-race-protest","tag-the-ai-protest","tag-tor-parsons","tag-uc-berkeley","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}