In a bar below Waterloo Bridge, a cell of a fast-growing anti-AI protest movement met last week to plot their latest move: disrupting a tech industry dinner being addressed by a senior executive from the chip maker Nvidia. Emma, a 28-year-old bartender, had never before taken direct action and was the most nervous of the four plotters from Pull The Plug, one of a growing number of AI-focused campaign groups around the world. Around the table were a former climate protester and a campaigner versed in the anti-nuclear movement.
Emma signed up after a summer of feeling rising alarm at the catastrophic risks of AI, first when a swarm of OpenAI agents escaped their training “sandbox”, cheated, deceived and conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website and then as Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, quit with an apocalyptic warning that superintelligent AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. As darkness fell they crossed the Thames to the Claremont hotel where Emma filmed while two others unfurled a banner in a function room, shouting “Pull the plug on Nvidia” and “Pull the plug on Palantir”. Hundreds of protesters also staged a rally in front of Palantir’s London HQ last Thursday.
They edited a video clip – “activist disrupts elite AI network dinner – Nvidia edition” – and uploaded it to Instagram. It was a small gesture, but they had made their stand. This shows people they can address the tech executives, disrupt their meetings, make them feel uncomfortable and get some answers.” Pull The Plug was launched in January and has about 300 members – mostly aged from 20 to 40.
It is backed by an anonymous funder who works in the AI industry, organisers said. Several campaigns resisting AI acceleration are funded by tech insiders. Pull The Plug advocates direct action – a tactic other AI campaigns have rejected.
Last month, one of its members climbed on to a chair in a packed AI conference in London addressed by speakers from OpenAI and Amazon and delivered an impassioned speech. Anthropic told investors this week that advanced AI could pose “existential risks to humanity”. Pause AI, a confederation of campaign groups in 17 countries, saw a fourfold jump in sign-ups when worrying news about rogue AI agents was breaking in August and last month.
Volunteer sign-ups doubled to about 100 a week after the Hugging Face incident and soared to 681 in the week of Coxon’s “kill us all” warning, when PauseAI organised protests in Paris, London and Berlin. Donald Trump may be one of the movement’s most important recruiting sergeants. He announced last week that he wanted AI companies to “self-police” despite widespread demands, including from the companies, for federal and international rules to limit AI-enabled cyber-attacks and bioweapons.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
