Pause AI and Stop AI: Meet the anti-AI groups facing questions after the attack on Sam Altman

The attempted firebombing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home last Friday, allegedly carried out by 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, has drawn attention to two anti-AI groups with similar names: Pause AI and Stop AI. Both have condemned the violence and said the suspect is not and never was a member of their organizations.

Still, the incident, in which Moreno-Gama also went to OpenAI’s headquarters and tried to shatter the building’s glass doors with a chair and threatened to burn the facility, surfaced his activity on Pause AI’s Discord server and renewed scrutiny of Stop AI’s direct actions targeting OpenAI last year.

A movement built on slowing AI

Pause AI, founded in Utrecht, Netherlands, in May 2023 by Joep Meindertsma, aims to halt what it calls “dangerous frontier AI” and staged its first protest outside Microsoft’s lobbying office in Brussels. The group, whose name was inspired by an open letter from the Future of Life Institute in March 2023 (which is also now its largest single funder), has since grown into a global grassroots movement with local chapters. That includes a separate organization called Pause AI US, led by Berkeley-based Holly Elmore, who has a PhD in evolutionary biology from Harva...