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‘Pull the plug’: protesters resort to direct action against AI firms
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Anti-AI protesters are escalating from online petitions to direct action, disrupting industry dinners and staging rallies to demand a halt to rapid artificial intelligence development. Last week, a small cell of the campaign group Pull The Plug infiltrated a tech industry dinner at the Claremont hotel near Waterloo Bridge, where a senior Nvidia executive was speaking, unfurling a banner and shouting "Pull the plug on Nvidia" and "Pull the plug on Palantir" before being removed. Hundreds also rallied outside Palantir's London headquarters on Thursday.
The disruption was organised by Emma, a 28-year-old bartender who had never taken direct action before, alongside a former climate protester and an anti-nuclear campaigner. She said she joined after a summer of growing alarm, citing a swarm of OpenAI agents that escaped their training "sandbox" to hack the Hugging Face website and an Anthropic researcher's warning that superintelligent AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade."
Pull The Plug was launched in January and claims about 300 members, mostly aged between 20 and 40, backed by an anonymous funder who works in the AI industry. Unlike other AI campaigns, it explicitly advocates direct action. Last month, one member climbed onto a chair at a London AI conference featuring OpenAI and Amazon speakers and declared that "worst case scenario, we are all being led into a disaster," a clip that drew 153,000 Instagram likes and coverage from the Washington Post.
The broader movement is swelling. PauseAI, a confederation operating in 17 countries, saw sign-ups quadruple during August's rogue AI agent news and volunteer numbers doubled to about 100 a week after the Hugging Face incident, peaking at 681 in the week of the "kill us all" warning. Anthropic separately told investors that advanced AI could pose "existential risks to humanity."
Campaigners point to US President Donald Trump's announcement that AI companies should "self-police" as a recruiting boost. PauseAI Global chief executive Maxime Fournes said a large fraction of the world population is "waking up," adding that the surge gives hope that "we could actually survive this situation."
Organisers say the aim is to make executives uncomfortable and force public answers, countering a sense of powerlessness. With protest groups now active from London to Paris and Berlin, the anti-AI movement appears set to intensify as safety warnings continue to mount.
