DoomsdaysCWThe Strange Disappearance of an #AntiAI #Activist
#SamKirchner wants to save the world from artificial superintelligence. He’s been missing for two weeks.
By Kaitlyn Tiffany, December 4, 2025
Excerpt: "The reaction from the broader #AISafety movement was fast and consistent. Many disavowed violence. One group, #PauseAI, a much larger AI-safety activist group than #StopAI, specifically disavowed Kirchner. PauseAI is notably staid—it includes property damage in its definition of violence, for instance, and doesn’t allow volunteers to do anything illegal or disruptive, such as chain themselves to doors, barricade gates, and otherwise trespass or interfere with the operations of AI companies. 'The kind of protests we do are people standing at the same place and maybe speaking a message,' the group’s CEO, Maxime Fournes, told me, 'but not preventing people from going to work or blocking the streets.'
"This is one of the reasons that Stop AI was founded in the first place. Kirchner and others, who’d met in the PauseAI #Discord server, thought that that genteel approach was insufficient. Instead, Stop AI situated itself in a tradition of more confrontational protest, consulting #GeneSharp’s 1973 classic, The #MethodsOfNonviolentAction, which includes such tactics as #SitIns, '#NonviolentObstruction,' and 'seeking imprisonment.'
"In its early stages, the movement against unaccountable AI development has had to face the same questions as any other burgeoning social movement: How do you win broad support? How can you be palatable and appealing while also being sufficiently pointed, extreme enough to get attention but not so much that you sabotage yourself? If the stakes are as high as you say they are, how do you act like it?
"#MichaëlTrazzi, an activist who went on a hunger strike outside #Google #DeepMind’s London headquarters in September, also believes that AI could lead to human extinction. He told me that he believes that people can do things that are extreme enough to 'show we are in an emergency' while still being nonviolent and nondisruptive. (PauseAI also discourages its members from doing hunger strikes.)"
Read more:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/sam-kirchner-missing-stop-ai/685144/
Archived version:
https://archive.ph/l6ACC
#AISucks #NoNukesforAI #AIResistance #Terminator #Alphabet #WarBots #SkyNet #Activists
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