# Nation's 1st major anti-AI protest sees hundreds march on downtown San Francisco - Daily Cal

*Источник: Daily Cal*
*Дата: 2026-07-12*
*Язык: en*

**Кратко:** In what became the largest demonstration against the development of AI in American history, approximately 350 protesters rallied at the headquarters of OpenAI before marching on the offices of Google DeepMind and Anthropic on Saturday. While previous protests outside OpenAI’s headquarters in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco resulted in arrests and criminal charges, Saturday afternoon’s peaceful demonstration saw no confrontation with police as the San Francisco Police Department cleared streets for the marching crowd.

In what became the largest demonstration against the development of AI in American history, approximately 350 protesters rallied at the headquarters of OpenAI before marching on the offices of Google DeepMind and Anthropic on Saturday.
While previous protests outside OpenAI’s headquarters in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco resulted in arrests and criminal charges, Saturday afternoon’s peaceful demonstration saw no confrontation with police as the San Francisco Police Department cleared streets for the marching crowd.
The demonstration, dubbed “The AI Protest,” was organized by a broad coalition of anti-AI organizations and labor groups, including Stop The AI Race, QuitGPT, AI Action, PauseAI, Evitable and Stop AI.
“AI poses an existential threat to humanity; it will only get smarter and almost certainly more powerful than us,” said Stop The AI Race founder Michaёl Trazzi. “We might all die.”
Trazzi, one of the main organizers of Saturday’s protest, is a former AI researcher who embarked on a hunger strike in September 2025 outside Google’s DeepMind office. In March, Trazzi organized the first “Stop the AI Race Protest,” drawing dozens of residents to the streets and setting the stage for Saturday’s mass mobilization.
Attendees shared Trazzi’s belief that the unrestricted development of artificial intelligence by “frontier labs” such as OpenAI and Anthropic may eventually result in the creation of artificial superintelligence, or ASI — a technology fundamentally more intelligent than any human.
While ASI does not currently exist, activists such as longtime Berkeley resident Paul Sas, who said he had been a part of the anti-AI movement for “decades,” worry that frontier labs are currently developing the techniques to make superintelligent AI a reality.
“Even now, we don’t understand (AI), and that’s because it’s the most powerful technology we’ve ever built,” Sas said. “It would be pretty easy for something like that to overpower us.”
The protest commenced at noon outside OpenAI headquarters, before marchers snaked up by Oracle Park and descended on downtown San Francisco to rally outside Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
The crowd was jovial as organizers handed out free slushies and a brass band marched with song and dance. Leaders from the various participating anti-AI organizations carried large signs calling for a moratorium on AI development, while attendees called out AI CEOs Sam Altman and Dario Amodei.
“One, two, three, four, we don’t want a robot war,” marchers chanted. “Five, six, seven, eight, no AI surveillance state.”
While the demonstration centered on potential human extinction at the hands of an all-powerful AI, organizers said they wanted the march to be lively and hopeful, reflecting values the movement hopes to safeguard.
“We are about protecting humanity,” said Stop The AI Race member Caitlin Yardley. “This movement needs to prioritize joy and community; we can see it here.”
Alongside the hardcore anti-ASI hawks, many protesters expressed concern over the short-term material impacts of AI, such as threats to domestic labor markets. Protesters said they are already feeling the impact of AI in San Francisco, as many tech employers have recently initiated mass layoffs.
Incoming UC Berkeley junior Sophie Bucker expressed concern that AI has automated away human creativity and art.
“We need to bring back human-made slop,” Bucker said. “There is something to be said about the struggle to create. Slop is a part of that struggle, and now we outsource all of that to AI.”
At 2 p.m., protesters wound their way through the SoMa neighborhood of SF, stopping to rally and hear speeches outside Anthropic and DeepMind, before reaching Rincon Park on the Bay at 3 p.m. for a post-protest party stocked with pizza and drinks.
The crowd was bolstered by a large group of social media influencers from plzdontkillus, an experimental 30-day conference in Berkeley for content creators concerned about AI. Tor Parsons, a YouTube creator with about 274,000 subscribers, helped to hold a banner at the front of the crowd.
“Most of us believe that there’s a world in which we have friendly AI, in which AI really does grow alongside humanity and ends up being a force for good,” Parsons said. “That’s just not the world we’re in.”
Sam Grotenstein contributed to this report.

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