Anti AI Movement: Who Is Fighting AI and the Doomers

The anti AI movement is the growing set of people and organizations trying to slow down, regulate, or stop the most powerful artificial intelligence systems. It is not one group with one leader. It is a messy coalition of street protesters, world-famous scientists, and philosophers. This page is a map. It explains who is fighting AI, what each group wants, and how they differ.

What Is the Anti-AI Movement?

The anti AI movement is a loose network of people who believe advanced AI poses serious risks and should be reined in. There is no membership card. Instead, it spans many camps that often disagree with each other.

Some members worry about jobs and art. Others worry about deepfakes and disinformation. A smaller but influential group worries that AI could one day threaten humanity itself. You can read more about this wider reaction on our AI backlash hub.

The AI safety movement inside it

The AI safety movement is the research-focused core of the anti AI movement. Its members study how to keep AI under human control. Many do not oppose AI at all. They just want it built slowly and carefully.

Who Is Fighting AI?

The people fighting AI fall into four broad groups: street activists, safety researchers, elder scientists, and public advocates. Each plays a different role in the same debate.

The street activists march outside AI labs. The safety researchers work on the technical control problem. The elder scientists lend credibility with their reputations. The public advocates carry the message to voters and lawmakers.

They do not all agree

It is a mistake to picture the anti AI movement as one team. A protester who wants a permanent ban has very different goals from a professor who wants better safety testing. The AI doomers who fear extinction sit at one end. People who mainly fear job loss sit at another.

The Protest Groups: PauseAI and StopAI

The two main AI protest groups are PauseAI and StopAI, and they split over one question: pause or ban. Both stage demonstrations outside companies like OpenAI. But their demands and their tactics are very different.

PauseAI

PauseAI was founded in May 2023 in the Netherlands by software entrepreneur Joep Meindertsma. Its goal is a temporary, global pause on training the most powerful AI systems. In May 2024, PauseAI held protests across thirteen countries before the AI Seoul Summit. The group rejects breaking the law.

StopAI

StopAI was founded in 2024 by Sam Kirchner and Guido Reichstadter. It views a pause as too weak. StopAI argues that artificial general intelligence is inherently uncontrollable, so it wants a permanent ban. The group embraces civil disobedience, and its members have been arrested for blocking the doors of OpenAI's offices. Learn more on our PauseAI and StopAI explainer.

A note on violence

Both groups have publicly condemned violence. After a 2026 attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home drew scrutiny, both organizations stated the suspect was never a member. You can follow this activism on our fighting back hub.

The Intellectual Roots: EA, Rationalists, and Longtermism

The ideas behind AI safety grew out of three overlapping intellectual movements: effective altruism, the rationalists, and longtermism. These communities took AI risk seriously years before it hit the headlines.

The rationalists

The rationalist community formed around the blog LessWrong, created by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Its members focus on clear thinking and probability. Many of the first serious warnings about AI came from this group. Our rationalist movement page covers its history.

Effective altruism and longtermism

Effective altruism, or EA, asks how to do the most good with limited resources. Over time, many EA members embraced longtermism, the idea that protecting future generations matters enormously. Because a bad AI could harm every future person, AI safety became a top EA cause. Critics say this focus can distract from present-day harms.

The Key Figures Warning About AI

A handful of scientists and thinkers give the anti AI movement its credibility, led by two Turing Award winners. Their reputations turn a fringe worry into a mainstream debate.

The scientists

Geoffrey Hinton, often called a godfather of AI, quit Google in 2023 to speak freely about the risks. He won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. In December 2024, he estimated a 10 to 20 percent chance that AI causes human extinction within three decades. Fellow Turing winner Yoshua Bengio has also become a leading voice for caution.

The philosophers and researchers

Nick Bostrom wrote the 2014 book Superintelligence, which warned that a smarter-than-human AI could be hard to control. Stuart Russell, a Berkeley professor, made a similar case in his 2019 book Human Compatible. Roman Yampolskiy argues the control problem may be unsolvable.

The doomer-in-chief and the organizers

Eliezer Yudkowsky is the most famous AI doomer. In 2025 he and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute published If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Max Tegmark helped found the Future of Life Institute. Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology carries the message to a mass audience.

How the Groups Compare

The main organizations differ most in their founding date, their tactics, and how far they want to go. The table below maps the major players, including their chief opponent, e/acc.

The letters that made headlines

Two documents defined the debate. The Future of Life Institute's Pause Giant AI Experiments letter of March 2023 gathered more than 30,000 signatures, including Bengio, Russell, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak. The Center for AI Safety followed in May 2023 with a single sentence: mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war. It was signed by the CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.

The Opposition: Effective Accelerationism

Effective accelerationism, or e/acc, is the movement that directly opposes the anti AI movement by arguing AI should speed up, not slow down. It treats fear of AI as the real danger. Understanding e/acc helps explain why the safety side faces such fierce pushback.

Where it came from

E/acc began as an online movement in a 2022 newsletter written by pseudonymous authors. The leading figure, known as Beff Jezos, was later revealed by Forbes to be Guillaume Verdon, a former Google quantum engineer. High-profile investors such as Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan publicly embraced the label.

What it believes

E/acc holds that unrestricted technological progress solves human problems and that slowing AI is both futile and harmful. The clash between the doomers and e/acc plays out daily on social media. Our effective accelerationism page explores the debate in depth. To understand what both sides are arguing about, see our explainers on AGI and how close we are to AGI.

Does the Public Support the AI Safety Movement?

Yes, polling shows most American voters support slowing down and regulating AI, even if few have heard of the movement's leaders. Public opinion leans clearly toward caution rather than acceleration.

In a 2023 YouGov poll for the AI Policy Institute, 72 percent of voters said they preferred slowing down AI development. In January 2024 the institute reported that 77 percent of voters, including 75 percent of Republicans, said the government should do more to regulate AI. Most also said they do not trust tech executives to regulate themselves.

The takeaway

The anti AI movement is small in numbers but large in reach. Its scientists shape headlines. Its protesters draw cameras. And its core demand, that AI should be built more carefully, matches what most voters already say they want. Whether the AI doomers are right remains an open question, because serious experts still disagree.

The people fighting AI are not a monolith. They are protesters, professors, and philosophers who share one worry and little else. Watching how this movement grows is one of the best ways to understand where AI is headed. To keep up with the latest, follow our daily AI briefing.