PauseAI NYC

PauseAI NYC is the New York City chapter of PauseAI, routed through PauseAI US, the U.S. national chapter of the international AI-safety movement calling for a coordinated pause on the training of the most powerful general-purpose AI systems. The chapter is volunteer-run — distinct from the three paid-staff PauseAI chapters (PauseAI US national, PauseAI London, PauseAI Paris) — and coordinates publicly through nyc@pauseai.info, the PauseAI NYC action page, a chapter Discord channel and WhatsApp community, Instagram (@pauseainyc), Twitter / X (@PauseAINYC), and a public Eventbrite organiser page. It is the chapter whose protest geography is anchored to the diplomatic-circuit rather than the frontier-lab cluster: where PauseAI San Francisco Bay Area sits inside walking distance of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, and PauseAI London inside walking distance of DeepMind, OpenAI, and Meta's King's Cross AI cluster, PauseAI NYC sits inside walking distance of United Nations Headquarters in Turtle Bay, and that geography shapes the chapter's signature campaign work.

Place in PauseAI US

PauseAI US describes NYC as one of its six core US chapters. The January 2025 newsletter records that the national organisation started 2024 with one local group — San Francisco — and ended the year with six "well-established, active groups across the country": SF, NYC, Chicago, Portland (Oregon), Phoenix, and Washington DC. By the Q2 2026 donor update, the national figure had reached 47 chapters across 29 states. Inside that growing network, the NYC chapter is the one PauseAI US's UN-related organising runs through, the chapter through which the federation's "global AI treaty" framing meets diplomats in their working geography, and the chapter to which prospective east-coast volunteers are routed via the PauseAI US local-groups directory and the chapter's own action page. Staff support comes from PauseAI US's Berkeley-based founder and Executive Director Holly Elmore, DC-based Organizing Director Felix DeSimone, and the rest of the PauseAI US central team rather than from a paid chapter director.

Activities

The chapter's own action page names four lines of work, all visibly modelled on PauseAI's standard local-organising playbook (the local-organizing framework) but distinguished by NYC's diplomatic-circuit geography and the federation's UN-track political theory.

• United Nations demonstrations. The chapter's signature public output is sustained demonstration at United Nations Headquarters in Turtle Bay, framed around persuading diplomats to support a binding global AI treaty.
• Monthly action meetings on the 11th. The chapter convenes recurring monthly action meetings on the 11th of each month, routed through Eventbrite and used to plan demonstrations, debrief recent actions, and onboard newcomers.
• First Friday Flyering. From the October 2024 premier session, NYC has participated in PauseAI's First Friday Flyering cadence — a monthly tactic in which volunteers in nine or more US cities simultaneously hand out flyers and recruit passers-by on the first Friday of each month.
• Community-building social events. The chapter runs film nights and member socials inside its core organising — for example a documented chapter watch of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist — alongside its public-protest cadence.

Notable actions

The NYC chapter's named public actions anchor the United Nations track inside PauseAI US's broader public-pressure campaign.

• 3 June 2023 — UN candlelit vigil. PauseAI held a candlelit vigil at United Nations Headquarters in New York City from 7:30 to 9:00pm on Saturday 3 June 2023 (sunset 8:15pm), framing the event around governments organising "a summit to halt the development of this dangerous technology" — the earliest documented PauseAI action in New York and one of the movement's first US actions, preceding Holly Elmore's September 2023 San Francisco protest that the PauseAI US Q2 2026 donor update names as the first-ever AI safety protest outside OpenAI.
• 18 July 2023 — cancelled UN Security Council protest. PauseAI's planned protest at the United Nations in New York, demanding that the UN Security Council "implement a global pause on the largest AI training runs," was cancelled before it took place. The cancelled event nonetheless cemented the chapter's UN-track political theory: that PauseAI's central campaign-of-record at the international level runs through multilateral institutions rather than only through frontier-lab pressure, and that the NYC chapter is the federation's working geography for that track.
• 13 May 2024 — Seoul AI Summit international protest day. PauseAI NYC was the New York anchor of PauseAI's thirteen-country international protest wave timed to precede the Seoul AI Summit, calling for "a stronger AI Treaty" and operationalising the federation's then-new tactic of geographically distributed simultaneous protests. The January 2025 newsletter records the NYC demonstration as the chapter's first major contribution to a PauseAI Global action day and the chapter's broader emergence from low-profile UN-track work into the federation's named public cadence.
• 21-23 September 2024 — Summit of the Future demonstration. PauseAI NYC mounted a three-day demonstration outside United Nations Headquarters timed to the UN Summit of the Future — the General Assembly's 22-23 September 2024 high-level convening and the political moment at which the UN was finalising its Governing AI for Humanity report. The chapter met at the bottom of the stairs to Mary O'Connor Playground (coordinates 40.74948, -73.97095, adjacent to UN HQ at 405 East 45th Street), 11am-3pm across three days, framing the action as urging "influential individuals on the AI governance report to vote to enforce AI safety." This is the chapter's most extensive named action in the public record and the action that most clearly distinguishes the chapter's diplomatic-circuit protest geography from the frontier-lab geographies of the SF and London chapters.

Place in the movement

PauseAI NYC is the corpus's second US PauseAI chapter entry after PauseAI San Francisco Bay Area and the corpus's first east-coast US AI-safety / pause local group. Within the global PauseAI federation, the chapter occupies a distinctive niche the other PauseAI chapter entries do not. First, it is the federation's working chapter for United Nations track organising — the chapter whose protest geography is anchored to multilateral institutions rather than frontier-lab offices, the chapter that organised the cancelled July 2023 Security Council protest and the 21-23 September 2024 Summit of the Future demonstration. Second, it is a volunteer-run chapter that nonetheless carries a substantial federation-wide load: PauseAI Global's "global AI treaty" framing depends on a sustained New York presence the NYC chapter supplies, in a way the volunteer PauseAI Utrecht chapter's chip-supply-chain framing or PauseAI San Francisco Bay Area's frontier-lab cadence do not parallel. Third, the chapter illustrates an organising-form pattern the corpus's existing PauseAI cluster did not yet name: a city-level PauseAI chapter that operates without paid staff or a named single public face, coordinating instead through a shared chapter inbox (nyc@pauseai.info), a Discord channel, and the federation's national-level staff backbone — a distinct chapter-shape from the paid-staff chapters at PauseAI US national, PauseAI London, and PauseAI Paris.