PauseAI

PauseAI is a global political movement founded in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in May 2023 by software entrepreneur Joep Meindertsma, who put his job as a database-company CEO on hold after concluding that AI capabilities were advancing far faster than alignment research. Radicalized by Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence and the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4, he told Euronews in 2023 that founding the movement meant giving it “everything I’ve got because I’m quite scared.”

From Brussels to Bletchley

The group’s demands are concrete: an international treaty pausing the training of the most powerful general AI systems, an international AI safety agency modeled on the IAEA, and no deployment of models with dangerous capabilities. Its first action was a May 2023 picket of Microsoft’s Brussels lobbying office; it protested outside the inaugural AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November 2023, outside OpenAI headquarters in February 2024 after the company softened its military-use policy, and across thirteen countries in May 2024 ahead of the AI Seoul Summit. In February 2026, more than 300 people marched through London in what the group called the largest AI-safety protest ever held. Protest signs capture the register: “When in doubt, pause.”

PauseAI occupies an odd corner of the debate: unlike artist and labor critics, it takes AI’s power more seriously than most of the industry does — its fear is that the technology works too well, not that it is a scam. Critics from both directions agree on little except that a verifiable global pause is diplomatically implausible; PauseAI answers that the same was said of nuclear test bans, and that somebody has to be the constituency for slowing down. The movement is related in spirit to the pause letter from the Future of Life Institute and figures like Eliezer Yudkowsky.