Several hundred protesters marched through London’s King’s Cross neighborhood on Saturday, February 28, in what organizers described as the largest anti-AI demonstration yet. The area is home to the UK offices of OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind, making it a deliberate target for two activist groups, Pause AI and Pull the Plug, who jointly organized the event.
Chants of “Pull the plug!” and “Stop the slop!” filled the streets as marchers carried signs ranging from the blunt (“Stop using AI”) to the pointed (“Demis the Menace,” a reference to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis). The concerns on display were wide-ranging: job displacement, AI-generated misinformation, abusive imagery, autonomous weapons, and human extinction.
A Movement Finding Its Footing
The scale represents a notable shift. When anti-AI sentiment first surfaced publicly in May 2023, it amounted to two or three people heckling outside a London venue where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was speaking. By June 2024, Pause AI drew a few dozen to a protest outside Google DeepMind‘s London office. Saturday’s march attracted a crowd significantly larger than either of those.
Joseph Miller, director of Pause AI’s UK branch and a co-organizer, said the group has been “growing very rapidly” and described its trajectory as “somewhat exponential, matching the progress of AI itself.” Miller is a PhD student at Oxford University studying mechanistic interpretability, a field focused on understanding the internal workings of large language models. His research has led him to conclude that the technology may be permanently beyond human control.
The concern, he said, does not require a rogue superintelligence. Placing AI in control of nuclear weapons would be sufficient. “The more silly decisions that humanity makes, the less powerful the AI has to be before things go bad,” Miller told a reporter attending the march.
Pentagon Deals Add Context
That concern landed against a backdrop of real policy movement. In the days before the march, the Pentagon attempted to push Anthropic into allowing its AI model Claude to be used for “all lawful purposes.” Anthropic declined. OpenAI, by contrast, signed a deal with the Department of Defense. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on the protest.
Matilda da Rui, deputy director of Pause AI’s UK branch and fellow co-organizer, framed AI as the defining final problem for humanity. Her view: the technology either solves every other problem permanently, or it ends human civilization. “It’s a mystery to me that anyone would really focus on anything else if they actually understood the problem,” she said.
A Broad Church of Grievances
The march’s atmosphere was notably relaxed, even jovial, which may reflect the diversity of people and concerns it attracted. One chemistry researcher present ran through a list of complaints that spanned the contested and the credible, from claims that data center infrasound induces paranoia in nearby residents, to the more grounded observation that AI-generated content is degrading the quality of academic search results. The researcher’s proposed fix: make it illegal for companies to profit from the technology.
Most attendees acknowledged plainly that tech companies were unlikely to respond to street protests. The movement appears to understand its current limitations. What Saturday demonstrated is that anti-AI sentiment has moved beyond a handful of researchers and a few lone hecklers, and has found enough of a public audience to fill a march through the heart of London’s AI industry.
Photo by Dima Iatco on Pexels
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