Critics Gather Outside OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI Offices for Industry Challenges

Protesters took to the streets of San Francisco on Saturday, standing outside the offices of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI to call for a pause in artificial intelligence.

According to Stop the AI ​​Race founder and author Michael Trazziabout 200 people participated in the protest. The participants were researchers, students, 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 the danger from advanced AI systems,” Trazzi said Decrypt. “Having all the people marching together shows that people are not alone in thinking about this alone, but there are many people who care about this.“

The march started in the afternoon outside Anthropic’s offices, then moved to OpenAI and then to xAI. At each stop, activists and speakers from participating organizations addressed the opposition.

According to Trazzi, the protest was intended to push AI companies to agree to build powerful AI models and make agreements with AI developers in other countries to do the same.

“If China and the US agree to stop developing dangerous models, they can focus on developing better systems for us, such as medical AI,” he said. “Everyone will be fine.”

Stop the AI ​​Race an idea it wants companies to stop building new types of borders and shift work to security, if other large labs “do the same,” which Trazzi said makes demonstrations in front of AI offices more important.

Fixed objection

This demonstration is the latest in an attempt to disrupt the development of AI.

In March 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter a seeker the suspension of additional features of the leading AI tool following the public launch of ChatGPT last year.

Signatories included xAI founder Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen. Since then, the open letter “Stop the Giant AI Experiment” has won 33,000 signature.

In September, Trazzi held a sabbatical hunger outside the Google DeepMind offices in London, where Guido Reichstadter sat on hunger strike outside Anthropic’s San Francisco offices.

Government officials and supporters of advancing the development of AI say that the lack of research in the U.S. could hurt competitors abroad. opportunity.

Last week, the Trump Administration released its own AI framework establishing a national level of regulation to guide the development of AI. The White House wrote this as a surrender “winning the AI ​​race.”

“Whether you’re in China or any country in the world, nobody wants systems that they can’t control,” Trazzi said. “Because we are in this race between companies and countries to build the machine as fast as possible, we are going through shortcuts and reducing security. There is no competition without winners. What we have is a system that we cannot control, that is why it is called a suicide race.”

But even if AI developers agree to halt development, proving it may be easier said than done. Trazzi suggested that one way to ensure a stop would be to reduce the amount of computing power used to train new models.

“If you can reduce the number of companies that can use this machine, then you are reducing the production of new models,” he said.

Following the San Francisco demonstration, Trazzi said additional demonstrations could be held in other areas where major AI companies work.

“We want to show where the workers are,” he said. “We want to talk to them, and we want them to talk to their leadership so that things can change from within,” adding that whistleblowers will have some power because “they are the ones who build.”

OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI did not immediately respond Decrypt’s requests for comments.