Protesters March on Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI with One Simple Demand: "Stop the AI Race"

San Francisco, CA — On Saturday, March 21st, Stop the AI Race (stoptherace.ai) will lead a march across San Francisco from the headquarters of Anthropic to OpenAI to xAI, calling on three CEOs by name — Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk — to publicly commit to pausing frontier AI development if other leading AI companies commit to doing the same.

The march is organized by Stop the AI Race (stoptherace.ai), a protest movement led by filmmaker, and former AI safety researcher Michaël Trazzi, who previously led the Google DeepMind hunger strike in London and has conducted nonviolent protests at the doors of AI companies.

Dr. David Krueger — an AI professor at the University of Montreal, founder of the nonprofit Evitable, and co-author of research with AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton — will speak at the rally. Krueger is a longtime advocate for AI risk awareness, having previously initiated the CAIS Statement on AI Risk, appeared on British national TV, and helped found the UK AI Security Institute. This year, Krueger has published op-ed columns in The Guardian and USA Today, urging policymakers to fight back against agentic AI and get rid of the AI computer chips. In his words: "The CEOs of these companies expect their work to cause mass unemployment and quite possibly human extinction. They should not be pursuing this work. At a bare minimum, they should agree to stop if others do, and governments should help coordinate if they can't."

Nate Soares, CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and co-author of NYT Best Seller "If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies" publicly endorsed the demand, writing: "I think 'commit to pause if everyone else will too' is a decent ask." He added that AI CEOs "clearly and plainly stating 'this is an emergency and it'd be better if we were all slowed' is a good first step." Soares will also speak at the march. Will Fithian, Professor of Statistics at UC Berkeley, will also attend, and give a speech, adding to a growing list of academics raising concerns about the pace of AI development.

In September 2025, Trazzi protested at Google DeepMind's London headquarters, calling on CEO Demis Hassabis to publicly commit to a conditional pause. Then, at Davos in January 2026, Hassabis suggested he would be open to it, but that international coordination was the key bottleneck. But the need for public pressure is urgent: In February 2026, Anthropic quietly dropped its "Responsible Scaling Policy," which had committed the company to pause development if its AI became too dangerous. OpenAI's charter includes a similar commitment to stop competing if another company is closer to AGI, yet the company has been weakening its safety commitments as it restructures into a for-profit corporation.

To reverse Big Tech's dangerous momentum, Stop the AI Race is calling on frontier lab CEOs to make a simple public commitment: if every other major AI lab in the world pauses development of more powerful AI systems, they will too. A "QuitGPT" protest was held on Tuesday, March 3rd, attracting more than 75 people in front of OpenAI's headquarters — the largest anti-OpenAI protest to date (see image above). This followed a PauseAI protest in London last month with couple hundred people.

The details for the upcoming Stop the AI Race protest can be found below: