I checked out one of the biggest anti-AI protests ever

Hundreds of protesters from activist groups Pause AI and Pull the Plug staged the largest anti-AI demonstration to date, marching through London's King's Cross tech hub on February 28. The area houses the UK headquarters of OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind. Demonstrators chanted slogans like "Stop the slop" and carried signs with messages from "EXTINCTION=BAD" to "Demis the Menace," targeting Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. The protest highlighted a broad coalition of concerns, including AI-generated misinformation ('slop'), job displacement, and existential risks from superintelligent systems. Organizers noted their movement is growing on an "exponential path," mirroring the technology they oppose.

Key organizers included Joseph Miller, a PhD student at Oxford studying mechanistic interpretability in LLMs, who warned that AI could become uncontrollable, especially if integrated into military systems like nuclear weapons. This fear gained traction following recent US government attempts to force Anthropic to allow military use of its Claude model. Another organizer, Matilda da Rui, framed AI as humanity's final problem—either solving all other issues or causing extinction. Despite the grave concerns, the protest maintained a pleasant atmosphere, with participants ranging from academics complaining about corrupted online research to those advocating for making AI unprofitable. Most acknowledged that tech companies would likely ignore the protest, seeing it as a necessary first step in building public awareness and political pressure against unfettered AI development.