Months after a daring hunger strike failed to pause development of Anthropic’s AI Claude, protestors have rallied around the company’s headquarters to call for a complete stop to AI development.
Last weekend, nearly 200 protestors with the organization Stop the AI Race demonstrated in front of Anthropic, demanding the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, publicly commit to pausing their development of AI. According to FirstPost, protestors included former tech industry workers, researchers, and members of other grassroots organizations like Pause AI and QuitGPT.
“The reason we are pausing AI is because we believe that building AI that can automate AI research, and that can self improve, could be a danger to the human race, especially human extinction,” Michaël Trazzi, an organizer with Stop the AI Race, told local reporters. “It’s not only me and other researchers saying this, it’s the lab CEOs themselves that [say] the risk is real.”
Stop the AI Race rallied around the company’s San Francisco headquarters for a while before marching on Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, where they made similar demands.
In a post on social media, Trazzi claimed that it was “the biggest AI safety protest in US history” so far.
One of the protestors involved, Guido Reichstadter, had previously protested outside Anthropic in the aforementioned hunger strike, which ultimately lasted for 30 days. Like Trazzi, Reichstadter’s concerns are existential — an AI system that could one day break containment and usher in unknown horrors on humankind.
On day nine of his hunger strike, Reichstadter told Futurism that frontier AI systems are an “entirely new class of danger.” Indeed, whether Claude is going to take over and start killing us all may be beside the point: in the hands of humans, it’s already picking strike targets for the US military.
“None of these companies have a right to do what they’re doing, which is consciously endangering my life, my family’s life, all of our lives,” Reichstader said. “The correct thing for them to do is stop the global race toward really dangerous AI that we’re all involved in.”
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