‘Stop AI Race’: Workers, students protest at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google’s US offices as layoffs surge – US News

The high-emotion march targeting AI companies on July 11 was organised by ‘Stop the AI Race.’ As established on its website, the group has a single demand: “Every major AI lab CEO must publicly commit to pausing frontier model development if every other major lab in the world credibly does the same.”

The same message was carried this weekend as a diverse group of protestors called for greater regulation of the AI industry, demanding that companies restrict all new AI model training. Anti-AI marchers cited concerns over rising rents, job cuts, existential risk and environmental harm, as seen in a video amplified by Reuters.

Anti-AI protests at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google offices in San Francisco

At first demonstrators gathered in front of the Mission Bay headquarters of Sam Altman’s AI startup before marching to the offices of Anthropic and Google DeepMind on Saturday (US time), according to photos of the development shared by San Francisco-based nonprofit news site Mission Local.

Protesters voiced their concerns through messages displayed on the many signs and banners they carried during the event, as they condemned the rise of artificial intelligence and the subsequent phasing out of the human workforce.

On our way to Anthropic! pic.twitter.com/Ndtq9gtinY

— Michaël Trazzi (@MichaelTrazzi) July 11, 2026

Some of these anti-AI messages seen during the march were:

• “Stop the AI Race”
• “AI is a weapon of mass destruction”
• “Survival over profits”
• “Pause AI”
• “AI is not inevitable”
• “It would be bad to get into an arms race over AI”
• “Stop slop”
• “It’s not too late to regulate”
• “In a race off a cliff no one wins”

Who was behind the ‘Stop the AI Race’ protests in San Francisco?

The Stop the AI Race march was led by activist and former AI researcher Michael Trazzi. He first gained attention for going on a hunger strike last year outside Google DeepMind’s office in London while demanding that AI development be frozen.

On Saturday, Trazzi ended up leading the group of AI-hating protestors to chant expletives against OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“We are in an emergency,” he told others. “The problem is they can’t stop the race, unless other people stop.”

Before this weekend’s demonstration, the former AI researcher marched on Anthropic, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, calling for a conditional pause on the advancing tech, in March as well.

Although neither company has directly responded to the group’s demands, the ‘Stop the AI Race’ website alludes to DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis reacting to calls for a collective pause on development in an interview with a Bloomberg journalist. The January interaction caught the tech leader saying, “I think so.”

I organized the biggest AI Safety protest in US History!

Nearly 200 people marched from Anthropic to OpenAI to xAI with one demand: commit to pausing if the others do too pic.twitter.com/YZt8n740G3

— Michaël Trazzi (@MichaelTrazzi) March 22, 2026

Elsewhere, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei has also repeatedly brought up dangers linked to AI. His assessment even landed the company in trouble with the Donald Trump administration as Anthropic and the Pentagon clashed over the military’s use of AI.

“Fundamentally, the enormous returns to intelligence in terms of power in the world, combined with the rapid pace of AI’s progress, creates a perfect storm for a surprise seizure of power by a range of dangerous actors,” Amodei wrote in a June blog post. “The danger could take a variety of specific technological or operational forms, but what they all have in common is the idea that AI could suddenly confer enormous power while routing around existing mechanisms of democratic oversight.”

“A fully automated drone army that sounds like science fiction today could, in the future, obey unlawful orders and allow governments to unilaterally entrench their power; professionally-trained humans are more likely to object to such illegal direction.”

The rising streak of ‘Stop the AI Race’ protests is a lot like the recent viral trend of fresh graduates “booing” numerous tech leaders addressing their university commencement speeches at a series of graduation ceremonies this year. Several top executives in their field, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Tavistock Development VP Gloria Caulfield, faced relentless backlash in real time as they prompted the inevitability of AI at US universities.

On its website, the Stop the AI Race group asserts “protest marches are just the start” of the calculated retaliatory efforts against architects of AI systems who continue to obsess over one-upping each other in a cut-throat competition of their own creation. The surge in criticism against artificial intelligence aligns with massive layoff waves across the industry, costing employees their jobs.

As Big Tech firms like Microsoft, Meta, and many more assume a more AI-first business strategy, more than 120,000 employees have already been laid off across 228 tech companies as of this week, according to the live layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi.