Dozens of protestors gathered outside Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI offices in San Francisco on March 21 calling on the three CEOs – Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk — to publicly commit to pausing frontier AI development if other leading AI companies commit to doing the same. Organized by Stop the AI Race, the march was led by filmmaker and former AI safety researcher Michael Trazzi, who led the Google DeepMind hunger strike and a 3-week long protest. “Once we have everyone agreeing on this conditional pause, I think we can enforce this pausing of AI,” said Michael Trazzi.
Why protest outside Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI offices
The protest movement comes after the White House’s release of an AI legislative framework intended to help nationalize AI policy. The Stop the AI Race group believes frontier AI poses significant risks. “The reason we are pausing AI is because we believe that building AI, can automate AI research, and can self improve, like a danger to the human race, especially human extinction. It’s not only me and other researchers saying this, it’s the lab CEOs themselves that the risk is real,” Trazzi said as quoted in a report by local media ABC7 News.
What is Stop the AI Race
Stop the AI Race is group of individuals working to “reverse Big Tech’s dangerous momentum”. It is “calling on frontier lab CEOs to make a simple public commitment: if every other major AI lab in the world pauses development of more powerful AI systems, they will too”. This isn’t the first time they have protested against AI companies. A “QuitGPT” protest was held on March 3 in front of OpenAI’s headquarters. This followed a PauseAI protest in London last month with couple hundred people.
