Courtesy of Michael Trazzi
As AI advances, so too does the desperation of those trying to stop it.
Two men, worried about the threat AI poses to humanity’s future, are now on hunger strike outside the offices of Anthropic and DeepMind.
For Guido Reichstadter, a 45-year-old activist, Sunday marked a week of protest without food. Reichstadter told Business Insider he plans to remain until the company responds to his concerns about the direction of AI development.
“I am calling on Anthropic’s management, directors, and employees to immediately stop their reckless actions, which are harming our society and to work to remediate the harm that has already been caused,” he wrote in a post on LessWrong, an online discussion forum.
While AI leaders from Geoffrey Hinton to Elon Musk have sounded the alarm about the pace of AI development, it has done little to slow progress as companies compete to develop artificial general intelligence, a still theoretical form of AI that reasons as well as humans. Hinton recently said on the “One Decision” podcast that “many of the people in big companies, I think, are downplaying the risk publicly.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei himself has issued dire warnings about the potential for white collar job losses. “AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years,” he said at a developer conference in May.
“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming. I don’t think this is on people’s radar,” Amodei later told Axios.
Reichstadter is asking Amodei to stop frontier development altogether. He told Business Insider in a phone interview that he delivered a letter to Amodei’s desk on his first day of protest.
“In that letter, I asked him to stop developing that technology and to do everything in his power to stop the race that he’s participating in,” he said. “I told him I’d be out here in front of his office waiting for his answer.”
Until then, he said he’ll subsist on water, electrolytes, and multivitamins.
“In the concrete world in which we’re living right now, all of the frontier labs are racing as quickly as they can to fully general superhuman systems. That’s what needs to stop,” he said. “I think great things could be done with very limited systems that don’t pose the same kinds of risks.”
Reichstadter said in 2022 he went on a 15-day strike without food outside the office of the Miami mayor to draw attention to the climate crisis, and felt like he could have kept going. He said he was so far “feeling good” this time around.
Reichstadter is the founder of Stop AI, a group that describes itself as a “non-violent civil resistance organization working to permanently ban the development of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) to prevent human extinction, mass job loss, and many other problems.”
He told Business Insider he had earlier been arrested for chaining shut the doors of OpenAI’s offices in San Francisco. He said he was heading to trial this month.
Reichstadter has inspired others. Michael Trazzi, a 29-year-old former AI safety researcher from France, has been protesting for three days, without food, outside DeepMind’s London headquarters.
Trazzi told Business Insider he studied computer science and artificial intelligence in Paris, and studied AI safety at Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, which shut down in April 2024. He spent time working as an AI and software engineer and now creates short-form content on TikTok and YouTube Shorts about AI policy.
Trazzi is also concerned about AI’s rapid development. He told Business Insider that collective pressure on AI executives to make public statements could facilitate change.
“My only ask is, concretely, I want Demis to say that he would not release any more frontier models if the other frontier AI labs were to also stop doing so,” he said, referring to Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s CEO and one of the pioneers of general intelligence. “If enough of those leaders say it publicly, then you get global coordination around a pause.”
Anthropic and DeepMind did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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