PauseAI

PauseAI is an international, grassroots political movement calling for a coordinated, treaty-backed pause on the training of the most powerful general AI systems until safety can be established and democratic control put in place. The organization was founded in Utrecht, Netherlands in May 2023 by software entrepreneur Joep Meindertsma, who set aside his work as CEO of his software company to organize a public response to what he describes as the gap between the speed of frontier AI capability research and the speed of alignment and governance work.

The movement is built around a concrete policy proposal: an international AI safety agency along the lines of the IAEA, an enforceable treaty pausing training runs above a defined threshold of capability or compute, liability for AI developers when their systems are used to commit crimes, and restrictions on training general AI systems on copyrighted material. PauseAI's stated theory of change is that public, peaceful pressure — protests, petitions, lobbying, and media work — can move governments to convene the kind of binding international summit that produces such a treaty.

Structure

PauseAI operates as a federation of national chapters under a global coordinating entity, PauseAI Global. Most national groups are volunteer-run; the U.S., U.K., and France have paid staff. Global leadership transitioned in late 2025 from Meindertsma, who continues as founder, to Maxime Fournes as CEO. Fournes had previously built and led PauseIA France, the organization's French chapter, and joined PauseAI in November 2023 from a career in machine-learning engineering. The current global executive team also includes Irina Tavera as Organizing Director (responsible for chapter support and volunteer growth) and Jonathan Moody as Communications Director.

National chapters operate semi-autonomously within a shared platform and protest calendar. PauseAI US, founded and led by Holly Elmore, runs as an independent U.S. nonprofit with its own donor base and staff, and supports a network of city-level local groups. Other national chapters include PauseAI UK (Joseph Miller), PauseAI Canada (Jeremy Eliosoff), PauseIA France (Clémence Peyrot following Fournes's promotion), PauseAI Germany (Benjamin Schmidt), and chapters in Australia, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere.

Tactics and recent activity

PauseAI is one of the most visible street-presence organizations in the AI-safety space. Its first public action, in May 2023, was a small protest outside Microsoft's Brussels lobbying office. By November 2023 the movement had organized a protest outside the inaugural AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, an event that PauseAI cites as proof of concept for its summit-driven theory of change.

Subsequent international waves include a May 13, 2024 protest staged in thirteen countries ahead of the AI Seoul Summit, a November 2024 international action including pickets outside Anthropic's San Francisco offices, a February 7–11, 2025 mobilization around the Paris AI Action Summit, and a 2025 protest at Google DeepMind's London office that the organization describes as its largest to date. Beyond protests, the chapters run petitions, public-comment campaigns, candidate questionnaires, and ongoing meetings with national policymakers.

Public profile and the April 2026 incident

In April 2026, a 20-year-old man named Daniel Moreno-Gama was arrested and charged after allegedly throwing an incendiary device at Sam Altman's residence and attempting to enter OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters; reporting noted he had been active on PauseAI's Discord server, though PauseAI says he was never a member. The organization issued a statement condemning the attack, with CEO Maxime Fournes telling CNN that the attack is "the opposite of everything we stand for" and that PauseAI exists as a peaceful, democratic outlet for AI concerns. PauseAI is distinct from Stop AI, a separate, smaller organization focused on civil-disobedience tactics; reporting around the April incident has occasionally conflated the two.

The organization's distinguishing posture in the broader space is its insistence on peaceful, public, and explicitly mass-political organizing — petitions, protests, summits, and treaty advocacy — as the route to a global pause, rather than insider policy work alone or direct action targeting individuals or facilities.