PauseAI Utrecht / Netherlands

PauseAI Utrecht is the Utrecht-anchored founding chapter of PauseAI, the international AI-safety movement calling for a coordinated pause on the training of the most powerful general-purpose AI systems. PauseAI was established in Utrecht in May 2023 by software entrepreneur Joep Meindertsma, who put his role as CEO of the software company Ontola on hold to organize a public response to what he describes as the gap between the speed of frontier AI capability research and the speed of safety and governance work. Utrecht is the city the movement grew out of, the legal home of the Dutch foundation Stichting PauseAI that became the organization's formal vehicle in February 2024, and — through 2024 — the working location of PauseAI Global's paid staff.

In practice the chapter operates more nationally than at city scale: PauseAI's public communities directory lists the Dutch chapter simply as "Nederland", and the same Utrecht-coordinated WhatsApp group routes both Utrecht-area volunteers and the chapter's Den Haag protest turnout for international action days. This local-group entry covers the country-wide Dutch unit as it has actually run since 2023, with Utrecht foregrounded because that is where the chapter was founded, where the foundation is operationally based, and where its founder lives and works.

Founding and legal vehicle

PauseAI began as Meindertsma's one-person call to action in early-to-mid 2023, after he became convinced — partly through reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and partly through engagement with the broader AI-safety community — that there was no public political movement matched to the scale of risk he saw in frontier AI training. The Utrecht starting point shaped what the movement became: the first PauseAI demonstration, at the Microsoft Innovation Center on Rue Montoyer in Brussels on 23 May 2023, was a short-train-ride action accessible from Utrecht, with volunteers signed up through PauseAI's Discord rather than a formal national-chapter list — the federation's local-organizing infrastructure did not yet exist.

The Dutch foundation was formalised on 13 February 2024 as Stichting PauseAI (KVK 92951031; RSIN 866227696; ANBI-registered from the same date), with the organizational purpose recorded as "Mitigate the most catastrophic risks of AI". The board is three Netherlands-based members: Joep Meindertsma as Chairman, Michiel van den Ingh as Treasurer, and Otto Barten as Secretary (Barten also directs the Existential Risk Observatory, the Dutch civil-society organisation co-hosting much of the chapter's convening work). The KVK-registered mailing address is a Zeist PO box, ~10 km east of Utrecht; the foundation's day-to-day operating address — listed on third-party nonprofit registries — sits in Utrecht at Skopjestraat 26, 3541ES.

The Dutch chapter in the global federation

For most of 2023-2024 PauseAI Global ran from Utrecht. The organization's 2024 Communications Director vacancy explicitly offered "Remote work or in-person in Utrecht, the Netherlands" as the working location — the public record of Utrecht functioning as PauseAI's de-facto international office during the federation's first eighteen months. The same vacancy reposted in 2025 moved the in-person option to London or Paris, reflecting the global staff's diffusion as the federation professionalised and Meindertsma transitioned out of day-to-day CEO operations in favour of Maxime Fournes. The Utrecht chapter is therefore the corpus's only local-group entity for which "originating local group" and "international coordination office" have largely been the same thing.

The chapter sits within PauseAI's federated model described in the Running a Local PauseAI Community guide: a global office in PauseAI's website-and-social-media-running role; national, regional, or city-based chapters running local campaigns; and a Discord local-communities channel that links them. Unlike PauseAI US (Holly Elmore), PauseAI UK (Joseph Miller), and PauseIA France (Clémence Peyrot) — which are the three national chapters with paid staff — the Dutch chapter is volunteer-run, but it has the closest historical and personnel overlap with PauseAI Global of any chapter in the federation.

Public actions in the Netherlands

Two threads dominate the Dutch chapter's on-the-ground record: targeting Dutch parliamentarians on AI-safety hearings and policy, and pressing ASML — the Veldhoven-based manufacturer of the EUV lithography machines without which advanced AI chips cannot be produced — on its role in the AI-compute supply chain.

• 11 August 2023 — Wijnhaven, The Hague. The first PauseAI action on Dutch soil was a Friday-afternoon protest at the Ministry of the Interior on Wijnhaven in The Hague, organized by Joep Meindertsma and co-coordinated with Ruben Dieleman of the Existential Risk Observatory. The demands targeted the Dutch government: invite AI safety experts to inform parliament, schedule a parliamentary debate on existential risks from advanced AI, prepare the Dutch position for the UK AI Safety Summit in November 2023, and use that position to push for international coordination on a training-run pause. Meindertsma framed the action through Dutch politics: "Why is this topic being ignored in Dutch politics? The Netherlands plays a key role in chip supply chain governance via ASML."
• 13 May 2024 — Den Haag international action day. The Dutch chapter joined PauseAI's first thirteen-country international protest wave ahead of the AI Seoul Summit, with The Hague as the participating Dutch city and the Utrecht-coordinated WhatsApp group as the volunteer-routing channel.
• 18 March 2024 — Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam. Meindertsma headlined AI Safety Meetup #2 at Pakhuis de Zwijger, organized by the Existential Risk Observatory — the chapter's recurring civil-society convening venue, distinct from its street-protest cadence and used to recruit "experts, enthusiasts, and curious minds" into the movement.
• 13 December 2025 — Amsterdam ASML protest. Roughly 25 attendees protested in Amsterdam calling on the Dutch government and ASML jointly to commit to a supply policy under which ASML would sell its EUV machines only to customers signed up to a superintelligence moratorium, with verification through an independent regulatory commission. The action operationalised Meindertsma's 2023 framing of ASML as a Dutch-controlled lever on the global AI-compute supply chain — turning a rhetorical point in a 2023 Hague speech into a concrete sectoral demand on a Dutch firm.

Place in the movement

PauseAI Utrecht is the corpus's first Continental European local-group entry and its first non-Anglo PauseAI chapter — sitting alongside PauseAI London (paid-staff UK chapter, King's Cross AI cluster) and PauseAI San Francisco Bay Area (originating chapter of PauseAI US, frontier-lab cluster) as the third of the federation's anchor local groups in the corpus. Its distinctive contribution is twofold: it is the chapter the entire global movement grew out of, and it is the chapter whose campaign geography points at a Dutch industrial actor — ASML — whose role in the global AI-compute supply chain gives a relatively small Dutch national protest movement an outsized point of leverage no other PauseAI chapter has. The Utrecht chapter also illustrates a structural pattern of the federation worth tracking in subsequent local-group entries: the city-chapter / national-chapter / global-office distinction that other chapters maintain cleanly is, here, deliberately collapsed — Utrecht is all three at once for the chapter's first two years, and the entry covers them as a single Dutch organising unit anchored in the founder's home city.