Pause IA (PauseAI France)

Pause IA is the Paris-anchored French chapter of PauseAI, the international AI-safety movement calling for a coordinated pause on the training of the most powerful general-purpose AI systems. Registered in France as an association founded in 2024, Pause IA is one of the three PauseAI national chapters with paid staff alongside PauseAI US and PauseAI UK, and is the chapter through which Maxime Fournes rose to global CEO of PauseAI in late 2025. The association runs nationally and operates a network of local groups across French cities, but its central staff, board, and named public actions — the Reprendre le Contrôle conference, the 1 May 2026 National Assembly protest, the Generation AI Paris summit — are concentrated in Paris, and this entry covers Pause IA as the Paris-anchored French chapter and national organising unit that the federation's national-groups directory lists at pauseia.fr.

Founding, leadership, and structure

Pause IA was co-founded by Maxime Fournes, a French machine-learning engineer who became convinced of frontier-AI risks after GPT-3.5's late-2022 release, joined PauseAI in November 2023, and built the French chapter out from there. Under Fournes's leadership through 2024-2025 the chapter formalised as a French association (the chapter is referenced as a French nonprofit founded in 2024 in its own Reprendre le Contrôle conference materials) and grew to roughly a hundred volunteers from a range of backgrounds — educators, AI safety researchers, psychologists, mathematicians, legal experts, and students per the chapter's own Qui sommes-nous page.

When Fournes succeeded Joep Meindertsma as PauseAI Global CEO in late 2025, the role of French chapter director passed to Clémence Peyrot, previously a campaign manager at the French animal-advocacy organisation PAZ; she retains the public spokesperson role and is the chapter's named primary press contact. The current Pause IA board, per the chapter's leadership page, is:

• Maxime Fournes — co-founder and President
• Clémence Peyrot — Executive Director
• Moïri Gamboni — General Secretary
• Romain Deléglise — Treasurer and Funding Lead
• Antonin Thil — board member and Local Groups Manager
• Jeanne Bazard — board member and Editorial Lead
• Antoine Subile — board member and Editorial Team Member

The chapter contacts are contact@pauseia.fr (general), presse@pauseia.fr (media), and direct mobile numbers for Peyrot and Fournes. Public coordination runs through pauseia.fr, the chapter's newsletter, and a social-media footprint across Facebook, Discord, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, and Threads — a broader public-channel mix than the sibling PauseAI London and PauseAI Utrecht chapters maintain.

The chapter in the global federation

PauseIA France sits within PauseAI's federated model alongside PauseAI US (led by Holly Elmore) and PauseAI UK (led by Joseph Miller). Of the three paid-staff chapters, the French chapter is the one that has produced a global CEO: Fournes built the French operation from late 2023, made it the source of "protests covered in ~30 articles by various French news publications" and "a key voice in French media, appearing on TV discussions and a plethora of podcasts" per the federation's own CEO announcement, and was elevated to PauseAI Global CEO from that base in late 2025. Pause IA is therefore the corpus's first PauseAI chapter for which the chapter-to-global pipeline is named in the federation's public record; its global-influence role is structurally distinct from the sibling PauseAI Utrecht chapter's role as PauseAI Global's de-facto international office through 2024 and the PauseAI London chapter's role as the UK paid-staff base.

Public actions and campaign work

Pause IA's named public output runs along four threads — a high-profile civil-society conference, an international-protest contribution, a sustained presence in French-language media, and a domestic-policy organising programme around French elections — most of it anchored in Paris.

• 7-11 February 2025 — Paris AI Action Summit protest wave. Pause IA was the French anchor of PauseAI Global's twenty-city protest wave ahead of the AI Action Summit, co-chaired by President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and held at the Grand Palais on 10-11 February 2025. The protest demands — that AI safety be made the central focus of the summit, that global treaties and an international enforcement body be established — were Pause IA's framing for French media coverage of the summit.
• 8 February 2025 — Reprendre le Contrôle conference, Paris. Pause IA organised the Reprendre le Contrôle — Forum des Solutions pour une IA Compatible avec l'Humanité at the Learning Planet Institute in Paris on the eve of the Action Summit. Self-described as the largest French-language AI-safety and ethics conference to date, the day brought together roughly a hundred experts, researchers, and decision-makers, with featured speakers including Lê Nguyên Hoang (Calicarpa), Lou Welgryn (Data for Good), Arthur Grimonpont (Reporters Sans Frontières), Raja Chatila (Sorbonne Université), and Charbel-Raphaël Segerie (Centre pour la Sécurité de l'IA). Co-partners were the Existential Risk Observatory, AI Forensics, and Data for Good. The conference operationalised Pause IA's positioning as a French civil-society convening organisation rather than only a street-protest movement.
• March 2026 — Élections Municipales charter. Pause IA published a fourteen-point municipal-elections charter inviting candidates in France's March 2026 municipal elections to commit to a public roundtable on existential AI risks, a municipal resolution calling on the French government to request an international pause on training the most powerful AI models, a letter to territorial parliamentarians, and a dedicated citizen panel on AI risks. Candidates from a dozen cities — including Metz, Lille, Brest, Nantes, Clermont-Ferrand, and Nice — signed the charter, with Nice's Jean-Marc Governatori the named signatory of all fourteen commitments. The charter is distinctive within the corpus's PauseAI chapter set as the only chapter-level intervention into a national electoral cycle.
• 1 May 2026 — National Assembly protest and "L'IA ne détruira pas QUE votre emploi" campaign. Pause IA mounted coordinated International Workers' Day demonstrations in Paris, Grenoble, and Périgueux. The Paris action assembled on the esplanade des Invalides at the corner of rue de Constantine and rue de l'Université, facing the National Assembly, between 10am and 11am, with Clémence Peyrot speaking as executive director: "The risk isn't only job losses but decisions on work, rights, and services delegated to uncontrolled systems we can't understand or challenge." The campaign cited research finding that 16% of French work tasks are already automatable — over 25% in management, law, finance, and tech — to argue that AI automation should be framed as a democratic and social-policy problem, not only a productivity story. This action established the chapter's most explicit attempt to bring the AI-safety pause demand into conversation with French labour and employment politics.

Beyond these named actions, Pause IA runs a Paris convening cadence around larger AI-industry events — for example its afternoon "Pause IA Summit @ Generation AI Paris : Sécurité & Gouvernance" session at the CNIT Forest, co-hosted by Fournes, Gilles Bréda, and Peyrot — and a sustained French-language broadcast presence including Cause Commune (Paris 93.1 FM)'s Parlez-moi d'IA episode #56 with Fournes.

Place in the movement

Pause IA is the corpus's third PauseAI chapter entry and its second Continental European local-group entry after PauseAI Utrecht, and the chapter's distinctive contribution to the movement triangulates three patterns the other PauseAI entries do not. First, it is the chapter that produced a global CEO — the federation's only chapter-to-global-leadership pipeline named in the public record. Second, it is the chapter that has converted street-protest organising into a major civil-society conference (the Reprendre le Contrôle forum) and an electoral-cycle organising programme (the municipal-elections charter), giving the corpus's PauseAI cluster its only chapter that operates simultaneously as a protest movement, a convening organisation, and an electoral-pressure actor. Third, its 1 May 2026 L'IA ne détruira pas QUE votre emploi framing is the corpus's clearest example of a PauseAI chapter integrating the existential-risk pause demand with mainstream French labour and social-policy politics — a substantive editorial line that sits structurally distinct from the PauseAI London chapter's frontier-lab King's Cross direct-action geography and the PauseAI Utrecht chapter's Dutch chip-supply-chain ASML framing.