PauseAI Germany / PauseAI Deutschland

PauseAI Germany is the German national chapter of PauseAI, the international AI-safety movement calling for a coordinated, treaty-backed pause on the training of the most powerful general-purpose AI systems. The chapter operates nationally from an operating address in Halle (Saale) — Bodestraße 6, 06122 Halle (Saale), per its January 2026 registration in the German federal Lobbyregister beim Deutschen Bundestag — with Berlin as the principal public-protest anchor and a student-team footprint reaching into Freiburg, Bonn, and Dresden through its university-anchored volunteer base. PauseAI Germany is the first German-speaking-Europe local group in the corpus and the first PauseAI chapter entry not anchored in an Anglophone or Romance-language country, sitting alongside the in-corpus PauseAI Utrecht / Netherlands, Pause IA (PauseAI France), PauseAI London, PauseAI San Francisco Bay Area, and PauseAI NYC chapters in the corpus's PauseAI cluster.

Founding, leadership, and legal status

The chapter is co-led by Benjamin Schmidt — a bioinformatician at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg named in the federation's About page as PauseAI Germany's national leader, and named in Radio CORAX's February 2026 interview as chair of PauseAI Germany — and Simon Skade, an AI safety researcher named in the same Radio CORAX interview as appeal organiser and listed alongside Schmidt as the chapter's Leitungsebene in the Lobbyregister entry. The chapter's wider team named on its Über uns page is a student-and-early-career roster — Hauke (political science student, Freiburg), Adrian (mathematics student, Bonn), and Karen (architecture student, Dresden) — that the Lobbyregister discloses by full name as Adrian Balthasar Glubrecht, Karen Ihrke, and the additional named lobbyist Evander Hammer.

The chapter formally registered with the German federal lobby register on 28 January 2026 as Registereintrag R007813, declaring its legal status as an "Informelle Bürgerbewegung ohne eigene Rechtspersönlichkeit" — informal citizen movement without independent legal personhood — its membership at 101 as of 19 January 2026, and its 2025 lobbying expenditure and full-time-equivalent paid staff at zero. The Lobbyregister filing names the chapter's area of interest as "Sonstiges im Bereich Medien, Kommunikation und Informationstechnik" and names the German Bundestag, the federal government, and EU institutions as the chapter's targeted addressees on safe development of artificial intelligence.

The chapter in the global federation

PauseAI Germany is a volunteer-run national chapter — distinct from the federation's three paid-staff chapters (PauseAI US led by Holly Elmore, PauseAI UK led by Joseph Miller, and Pause IA led by Clémence Peyrot following Maxime Fournes's elevation to PauseAI Global CEO in late 2025). Within the federation's directory of national chapters PauseAI Germany sits alongside the volunteer-run chapters in Canada, Australia, Spain, and Italy, and shares with PauseAI Utrecht / Netherlands the Continental European volunteer-anchor pattern that the Paris and London chapters have moved beyond. The chapter routes German-language supporters through the pauseaide.substack.com newsletter, Instagram and TikTok at @pause_ai_germany, and shared X and YouTube channels at @pauseai_de — a German-language public-channel mix that gives the chapter the corpus's first dedicated German-language PauseAI media presence.

Public actions and campaign work

PauseAI Germany's public-output record runs along three threads — international-protest contributions in Berlin, an academic-community appeal targeted at the German government's AI summit positioning, and a sustained domestic public-communications campaign on AI and labour.

• 13 May 2024 — Berlin, AI Seoul Summit international protest wave. PauseAI Germany was the German anchor of PauseAI Global's first thirteen-country international protest wave ahead of the AI Seoul Summit, with Berlin as the named German participating city and Facebook-event sign-ups for the Berlin action. This was the chapter's earliest sustained public action on the federation's record and the basis for assigning a 2024 founding date in this entry, ahead of any formal legal registration.
• 7-11 February 2025 — Berlin, Paris AI Action Summit international protest wave. The chapter joined PauseAI Global's twenty-city protest wave around the Paris AI Action Summit co-chaired by President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with Berlin again the German participating city.
• 18 February 2026 — Appell zum KI-Gipfel (Delhi AI Impact Summit appeal). The chapter's most concrete intervention into German AI politics to date was the Appell zum KI-Gipfel 2026, launched as a Pressemitteilung on 18 February 2026 — the day before the AI Impact Summit in Delhi (19-20 February 2026) — calling on the German delegation to publicly advocate for a global AI safety agreement built on two principles: "Rote Linien" prohibiting AI systems posing unacceptable global risks (uncontrolled self-improvement, systematic deception of humans, catastrophic-misuse enablement), and binding safety standards with independent international enforcement. More than 140 German university professors signed per Forschung & Lehre's independent reporting, including 17 researchers from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg as a named cluster anchored at the chapter's home university, ten researchers from the University of Bonn and the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik per Forschung & Lehre, and notable individual signatories including Peter Scholze (2018 Fields Medalist, Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik) and Andrzej J. Buras (Max-Planck-Medaille 2020, TU München). The appeal made the chapter the corpus's first PauseAI chapter to translate the international pause demand into a German academic-community petition with named professorial signatories targeted at a German government AI-summit position.
• 2026 — Nicht nur dein Job. The chapter's current public-communications campaign frames AI control loss as a threat beyond employment to autonomy, democracy, and human existence; tracks AI-related job losses since January 2025; collects supporter stories via the "Erzähl deine Geschichte" survey; and cites BSI (the German federal cybersecurity agency), ifo Institut, Bitkom, and Anthropic among its data sources. The campaign's labour-and-democracy framing parallels Pause IA's 1 May 2026 L'IA ne détruira pas QUE votre emploi thread on French Workers' Day — both chapters are integrating the existential-risk pause demand with mainstream Continental European labour-and-social-policy politics, structurally distinct from the Anglophone PauseAI chapters' frontier-lab and policy-summit framing.

Beyond these named public actions PauseAI Germany contributes to the federation's continuing international protest cadence — including the in-corpus camp-pauseai-international-protests-2023-ongoing — and to PauseAI Global's continuing chapter-coordinated public-communications work.

Place in the movement

PauseAI Germany is the corpus's first German-speaking-Europe local group of any kind and the corpus's first PauseAI chapter entry anchored outside the Anglophone (London / Bay Area / NYC) and Romance-language (Paris) cluster. Its distinctive contribution to the corpus's PauseAI shape is threefold. First, it is the chapter that has converted university-faculty membership into a public petition with named professorial signatories targeted at a German government AI-summit position — the Delhi appeal is the corpus's first PauseAI chapter intervention that mobilised a domestic academic constituency under the chapter's own name rather than relying on the federation's general open-letter infrastructure. Second, it is the corpus's first PauseAI chapter formally registered with a national legislature's lobby register — the German federal Lobbyregister entry anchors a structural distinction between the chapter's public-civil-society Bürgerbewegung self-description and the political-institutional infrastructure it has chosen to operate within. Third, the chapter's Halle (Saale) operating anchor — a city of roughly 240,000 in Saxony-Anhalt rather than a major German tech hub — gives the corpus's PauseAI cluster its first chapter not anchored in a national capital, frontier-lab city, or financial centre, and a structural counter-example to the assumption that frontier-AI-safety organising is necessarily concentrated in the geographies the labs themselves occupy.