Campaign groups report surge in membership after a spate of AI safety alerts and apocalyptic warnings
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.
“We did not consent to the kind of build-out that you are planning here,” the activists yelled as they were wrestled out of the door. They edited a video clip – “activist disrupts elite AI network dinner – Nvidia edition” – and uploaded it to Instagram.
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