Report from the march to Stop the AI Race
This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me.
Report from the march to Stop the AI Race
July 12, 2026<br>On Saturday, beneath a sparkling blue sky, I joined the march to Stop the AI Race. We gath­ered in front of OpenAI’s office in Mis­sion Bay, then walked through the city to Anthropic’s HQ beside the Transbay Transit Center.
Stop the AI Race
If this had been a march orga­nized around the dif­fuse con­cept of “AI BAD”, I wouldn’t have joined. But I am just so impressed by the ele­gance of Stop the AI Race’s 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.
Like, how rare is this?? A protest move­ment with (1) an actual objective, that (2) could con­ceiv­ably be met. As much as any­thing else, I came out in sup­port of sim­plicity and clarity.
A rabble-rousing robot
But I also believe that the world would ben­efit from a pause in fron­tier model devel­op­ment. The weird thing about this debate is that no one, not even the most hyped-up accelerationist, dis­agrees about the situation:
Here is a powerful technology,
operating in a way that no one really understands,
with profound effects on the economy, not to mention human psychology,
that are very difficult, maybe impossible, to make plans around.
For my part, I look at that fact pat­tern and think: uh, yes, this merits great cau­tion and deliberation! Measured, I would say, in coun­tries and years, not “model cards” and weeks. And my response isn’t reflexive, but deep-rooted — I’ve been grap­pling with this tech­nology for ten years.
Geoff Hinton, here in spirit
This isn’t a call to outlaw lan­guage models. It has been widely observed — Jack Clark makes this point all the time — that even if model devel­op­ment stopped immediately, the metab­o­liza­tion of what’s cur­rently avail­able would hap­pily occupy busi­nesses and researchers alike for decades. Decades! These things are growing and mutating faster than any­body can make sense of them. So … here’s a wild thought … let’s slow down, and make sense of them.
I’ll direct your atten­tion to the lan­guage of a recent post from the Anthropic Insti­tute. It’s encum­bered by a few extra clauses, but the spirit of Stop the AI Race’s demand shines clearly through:
We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or tem­porarily pause fron­tier AI devel­op­ment to enable soci­etal struc­tures and align­ment research to keep up with the advance of the tech­nology. The Anthropic Insti­tute will con­duct research — in col­lab­o­ra­tion with many others — and take actions to help build the sys­tems that a cred­ible slow­down or pause would require. These sys­tems would enable fron­tier AI devel­opers to verify that others glob­ally have actu­ally stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the aus­pices of a coor­di­nated slow­down to jump ahead in secret. If such sys­tems existed, we expect that we would slow down or tem­porarily pause, if other devel­opers at or near the fron­tier also did so in a ver­i­fi­able manner.
Even if the danger isn’t as exis­ten­tial as the doomiest doomers imagine (I spotted these two in attendance) I believe this is a great oppor­tu­nity for humanity to prove that we can actu­ally make choices about the devel­op­ment and deploy­ment of pow­erful tech­nology. If we can’t, then we are not as sov­er­eign as we imagine; if we can’t, a machine god has already taken over this planet, and it’s called the market.
A pause isn’t impossible, and pow­erful, unpre­dictable AI is (as a gor­geous blue banner at the head of the parade declared) not inevitable.
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This whole thing was better than I expected: a big crowd, num­bering in the low hundreds; a great vibe, goofy and polite; per­fect weather, never assured in San Fran­cisco in July; and a marching band! We love a marching band. (Who paid for the marching band … ?)
And, of course, it’s worth appreciating, here and now in this country’s 250th summer, that we can still do things like this. Raise a mild ruckus, take up a bit of space, walk in the middle of the street. As we marched past Oracle Park, there was a Giants game underway, and it occurred to me that the great majority of the fans inside agree with the argu­ment of this protest much more than they agree with the...