March Against the Machines (London, 28 February 2026)

On 28 February 2026, PauseAI UK and Pull the Plug co-organized the March Against the Machines in London — the largest protest focused specifically on AI safety on record to that date — drawing between 300 and 500 participants. Organized by PauseAI UK director Joseph Miller and deputy director Matilda da Rui, the march started at OpenAI's London offices in King's Cross, proceeded through the tech hub past the London offices of Meta and Google DeepMind, and ended at a church hall in Bloomsbury for a citizens' assembly-style discussion on AI governance. It is the most attended action in the PauseAI international protests campaign to that point and the first in which the coalition extended substantially beyond the AI safety research community into environmental, creative-industry, labour, and democracy movements.

What happened on the day

The march assembled at OpenAI's King's Cross office and moved through the surrounding tech cluster, stopping at the London sites of Meta and Google DeepMind before reaching its Bloomsbury endpoint. Attendees carried signs reading "Demis the Menace," "Pull the plug! Stop the slop!," and "Extinction=Bad"; call-and-response chants questioning tech-company trustworthiness ran through the march route. Global Action Plan joined as a coalition partner alongside PauseAI and Pull the Plug.

Speakers included Miller ("We think this is the most important issue of our age"), global PauseAI CEO Maxime Fournes ("Look around you...We've all arrived at the same conclusion: slow down"), Pull the Plug co-founder Frieda Lurken on bridges between safety and ethics perspectives, and Dr. Rachael Kent of King's College London on corporate power and tech-monopoly accountability. PauseAI's demand was that AI company CEOs publicly support a pause in frontier-model development as a first step toward binding international regulation. Pull the Plug's demand was legally binding Citizens' Assemblies to decide AI development policy. The two frames coexisted and were presented by organizers as complementary.

The day closed with a citizens' assembly-style session at a Bloomsbury church hall, intended by Pull the Plug to model at small scale the deliberative governance format it calls for at government level.

Significance

The Transformer News post-action report characterizes the 300–500 attendance as the campaign's largest turnout to that date, surpassing the 30 June 2025 Google DeepMind London picket. Where earlier PauseAI protests had drawn primarily from the AI safety research community, the February 2026 march unified safety researchers, ethics advocates, environmental activists opposing data-centre resource use, creative professionals facing AI-generated competition, and labour organizers — a breadth Miller named directly: "This will be tiny compared to what comes next." The march arrived four days after the PauseAI Brussels European Parliament action on 24 February 2026, making the last week of February 2026 the campaign's most concentrated period of high-visibility European organizing to that point.