A protest is being planned Saturday with organizers saying they want to push the CEOs of artificial intelligence companies to pause the development of the technology.

Without being explicit about what they would want accomplished during a pause in the development of AI, a group calling itself Stop the AI Race has planned several rallies on Saturday outside the offices of three San Francisco AI companies: Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. Their one demand, they say, is "every CEO must publicly commit to pausing frontier AI development if every other lab does the same."

"Demis Hassabis (CEO of Google DeepMind) already said he'd be open to a conditional pause at Davos in January 2026," the group says on its event page. "That was the main ask of our Google DeepMind protest in September 2025. Dario Amodei also said at Davos he'd 'figure something out' if it were only him and Demis in the race. And OpenAI's charter already includes a commitment to stop competing if another lab is closer to AGI."

"​But," they continue, "in February, Anthropic quietly dropped its own commitment to pause if its AI became too dangerous. And OpenAI has been weakening its safety commitments as it restructures into a for-profit corporation."

The group asks the CEOs, "would you pause if every other major AI company in the world pauses?" But, of course, that would entail getting all Chinese companies to agree to this pause as well, and that seems impossible.

Still, this isn't likely to be the last general protest we're going to see against the AI industry, particularly as more human jobs get lost to bots. Another group, called Stop AI, has been staging small demonstrations around the Bay Area for two years now, with a mission to end the industry, full stop, and "prioritize biological life."

And while fairly different, this protest on Saturday is reminiscent of the anti-tech protests of the early 2010s, which were mostly focused on issues of gentrification, rising housing costs, and the small army of tech shuttle buses that suddently began clogging SF streets — which came to symbolize how privileged tech workers who worked on the Peninsula were driving up housing costs for everyone.

Saturday's first rally will begin outside Anthropic's headquarters at 500 Howard Street, at noon. From there, following speeches at 1 pm, the group plans to walk to Mission Bay, to OpenAI's headquarters at 1455 Third Street. After speeches there, they will proceed to xAI's offices at 3180 18th Street, where some short concluding speeches will occur at 3:30, before the group heads to "celebrate" at Dolores Park.

Top image: Photo via Stop AI/Instagram