PauseAI international day of action ahead of the Seoul AI Summit (13 May 2024)

On Monday 13 May 2024, PauseAI staged its second international day of action, coordinated demonstrations in fourteen cities — San Francisco, New York, Portland, Ottawa, Reykjavík, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Den Haag, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Sydney, and São Paulo — across thirteen countries and four continents, nine days before the AI Seoul Summit convened on 21–22 May. The action's stated purpose was to convince the ministers travelling to Seoul that the international leaders' track is "the only" route to a coordinated pause on frontier-AI training and that they should "be the adults in the room". It is the campaign's first large-scale multi-continent day of action, the proof of concept for the summit-pegged mobilization format the PauseAI international protests campaign would continue to use through 2024 and 2025.

Context

PauseAI's first international day of action had been the 21 October 2023 eight-city mobilization timed to the inaugural Bletchley AI Safety Summit. By the time of the May 2024 action the campaign had also staged its 12 February 2024 OpenAI San Francisco picket — a named-target action against the company's removal of usage-policy language prohibiting military applications — and was preparing for the next link in the AI Safety Summit chain: the Seoul AI Summit on 21–22 May 2024, co-hosted by South Korea and the United Kingdom and intended to follow up on the Bletchley Declaration of November 2023. The Seoul programme was expected to produce the Frontier AI Safety Commitments, a voluntary set of public safety undertakings by major AI developers; the campaign treated those voluntary commitments as conspicuously short of what its theory of change required — a binding international treaty on frontier-AI training above a defined capability or compute threshold — and timed the 13 May action to put visible public pressure on the ministers travelling to Seoul.

What happened on the day

PauseAI's master index lists actions in fourteen cities on 13 May 2024: San Francisco, New York, Portland (United States); Ottawa (Canada); Reykjavík (Iceland); London (United Kingdom); Berlin (Germany); Stockholm (Sweden); Den Haag (Netherlands); Paris (France); Rome (Italy); Oslo (Norway); Sydney (Australia); and São Paulo (Brazil). Each action was locally organised by a country lead or volunteer cell, with cross-city coordination running through PauseAI's Discord and chapter channels; signups had been opened weeks in advance across Facebook Events, Eventbrite, Partiful, WhatsApp, and Meetup.com.

The San Francisco action was staged outside OpenAI's headquarters and was deliberately timed against the GPT-4o launch the company was unveiling the same morning. Around a dozen protesters carried placards reading "When in doubt, pause" and "Quit your job at OpenAI"; PauseAI spokesperson Liron Shapira told KQED that "we're entering a regime of AI capabilities that nobody understands and nobody knows how to control", and PauseAI founder Joep Meindertsma framed the Seoul-summit ministers as "the only ones who have the power to stop this race".

The London action was staged outside the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in central London. TIME magazine reported a turnout of "20 or so" demonstrators chanting "stop the race, it's not safe" and "who's future? our future" — Oxford undergraduate Gideon Futerman, freelance writer Tara Steele, and protester Anthony Bailey were among those who spoke to reporters. Futerman framed the case for binding rules as a question of corporate trustworthiness ("companies have proven they cannot be trusted"); Steele framed the impact in immediate-labour terms, telling TIME that "demand for freelance work has reduced dramatically"; Bailey framed the case for a moratorium as a problem of misaligned incentives — tech companies will continue building dangerous systems, he argued, because "that's the economically valuable stuff".

Karmactive's overview — running across the London, San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Rome, and Ottawa actions — additionally records Meindertsma's signature historical analogy of the day ("we've managed international bans before, I believe we can pause AI too") and the campaign's three-part demand set: an immediate halt to the development of artificial general intelligence systems; all UN member states to sign a treaty; and the establishment of an international AI safety agency with authority over deployment approvals and large training runs.

Significance

The 13 May 2024 day of action is the moment at which the PauseAI international protests campaign became a multi-continent operation. The 21 October 2023 Bletchley-eve action had been eight cities clustered in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Australia; 13 May 2024 extended that footprint southward (São Paulo) and northward (Reykjavík, Oslo), opening a four-continent — Europe, North America, South America, Oceania — record that the February 2025 Paris-summit mobilization would later push further across Africa. Read alongside the campaign's prior actions, the 13 May day of action is the campaign's working proof of concept for the summit-pegged international-mobilization format: a single calendar day, a single message, named-target sites where they are available (OpenAI in San Francisco, the responsible government ministry in London), and a city footprint large enough to register internationally as a coordinated public response to a multilateral summit rather than a local picket. It is also the action that crystallised the rhetorical register the campaign would continue to use — "be the adults in the room"; "we've managed international bans before"; "stop the race, it's not safe" — into the durable public framings the campaign's outcomes record now traces forward to Fortune, Wired, TIME, and the floor of Westminster.