“I want my niece Sophia to have a future,” said Michaël Trazzi as roughly 150 demonstrators gathered on Saturday outside the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI to demand a bilateral pact between Washington and Beijing to halt the artificial intelligence race.
The protest preceded a planned meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Organizers from the movement Stop The AI Race called for a treaty to ban superintelligence—artificial intelligence systems that exceed human cognitive capabilities.
Trazzi, a French founder of the movement, told the crowd that he fears tech companies in the United States and China might build “an intelligence so smart it could kill everyone, including you and me,” before his niece even learns to speak. Demonstrators chanted slogans demanding a slowdown in AI development and marched behind a brass band. Placards compared the technology to a weapon of mass destruction.
The San Francisco demonstration marked the fourth march organized by Stop The AI Race since March. Protesters also gathered in about 20 other cities worldwide, including Paris, Berlin, and Montreal.
In Paris, the demonstration drew approximately 100 people, according to Clémence Peyrot, executive director of Pause IA. “We think that the AI race can only stop if states agree on a treaty, we cannot trust companies to guarantee our security,” Peyrot told europe1.fr.
Several signs referenced the 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, written by American researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Soares participated in a simultaneous protest in Washington.
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, headed by Yudkowsky, published an international agreement proposal in May modeled after the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Zack M. Davis, a former software engineer who joined the San Francisco protest, argued that individual restraint is impossible without international coordination.
“If Anthropic stops alone, OpenAI risks rushing ahead. If the United States stops alone, China risks rushing ahead,” Davis told europe1.fr. He displayed a placard generated by AI showing humanoid athletes in the colors of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini abandoning a sprint. “Current technology is really great,” Davis told europe1.fr. “But that doesn’t mean the danger isn’t real.”
Leaders in Washington have largely dismissed calls to decelerate AI research. In September, prior to receiving Xi Jinping in Washington, Donald Trump rejected the idea of slowing down development, declaring that whoever wins AI wins overall.
Activists at Berkeley acknowledged the modest scale of the current demonstrations but urged persistence.
“It’s hard not to see these actions as a whisper. But if you stopped, it would be the silence,” said Katia Bravo, a student at Berkeley. “If we continue to whisper together, we will make a lot of noise.”
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