Pull the Plug

Hundreds of protesters marched through London's King's Cross tech hub on Saturday, past the UK headquarters of OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind, in what organizers called the largest anti-AI protest to date.

Organized by activist groups Pause AI and Pull the Plug, the march featured signs ranging from the philosophical ("WHO WILL BE WHOSE TOOL?") to the blunt ("EXTINCTION=BAD") to the personal ("Demis the Menace," targeting DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis).

MIT Technology Review notes the rapid escalation: in May 2023, only two or three people showed up to heckle Sam Altman at a London speaking event. By June 2025, Pause AI drew a few dozen. This weekend, it was hundreds.

The concerns ranged widely — job displacement, online slop, abusive AI-generated images, autonomous weapons, and existential risk. One older man's sandwich board summed up the mood: "AI? Over my dead body."