Maxime Fournes

Maxime Fournes is the Chief Executive Officer of PauseAI Global since the December 2025 handover from founder and continuing Board Chair Joep Meindertsma, having founded and led PauseIA France from his arrival at the federation in November 2023 (see Person entry), and is the corpus's on-record French and francophone-European voice on the case for a treaty-backed pause on training the most powerful general AI systems, the substantive multi-sector risk argument (cybersecurity, finance, labour, military), and the international red-lines coordination route through European-Parliament and French-National-Assembly testimony. He is tracked here as a Voice because his sustained French-language public output — the long-form podcast register with Gaëtan Selle on The Flares on PauseAI's policy proposals and the limits of acceptable activism; the IMAGINAIRES podcast conversation with Gérald Holubowicz of 10 September 2024 framed as "Faire une Pause AI"; the Éthique et Psycho podcast of 31 January 2025; the recurring French YouTube interview register through "IA sur pause : d'accord ou pas ?", "Il est urgent de mettre l'IA en pause", "L'IA NOUS ÉCHAPPE", and "Il Faut Mettre l'IA En Pause Au Plus Vite"; the 10 February 2025 Place de la Bastille mobilization at the Paris AI Action Summit; the 24 February 2026 European Parliament address in Brussels; his named-byline testimony to the French National Assembly through his CeSIA fellowship; and his post-promotion English-language press register through Dazed Digital and CNN — carries the working argument that frontier-AI training above a defined capability or compute threshold is best paused now by treaty and compute governance, that the EU AI Act was not designed for existential risk from superintelligence and the EU should now extend its regulatory frameworks accordingly, and that the substantive case for pause is owed to a public-organiser register operating through French-civil-society and francophone European-civil-society audiences rather than through the Anglophone AI-safety field alone.

The Voice anchors three movement-area registers that the corpus's voices slice had previously left empty or under-tended.

• The first France voice and first francophone European voice on AI safety. The corpus's voices slice carried no France voice before this entry, and no francophone European voice on AI safety / frontier-AI governance — despite PauseAI being in corpus with PauseIA France as a national chapter, despite the French-language AI-safety-and-existential-risk discourse field running as a distinct sub-register inside the wider international AI-safety argument, and despite Fournes himself sitting beside Stuart Russell at the European Parliament on the substantive case for international coordination. The Person side has Fournes in corpus through person-maxime-fournes; the Voice side now anchors the French-language named-byline treatment of the pause case running through Fournes's recurring podcast and YouTube interview register, the Place de la Bastille Paris AI Action Summit address, the European Parliament address in Brussels, and the named-byline testimony to the French National Assembly through CeSIA.
• The matched pair of pause-movement voice anchors inside the international federation. This Voice sits beside voice-joep-meindertsma as the matched pair of pause-movement voice anchors the corpus tracks through the international PauseAI federation — Meindertsma on the founding, Board Chair, software-entrepreneur-turned-organiser, psychology-of-x-risk, and Dutch-civil-society register; Fournes on the CEO, chapter-builder, machine-learning-engineer-turned-organiser, EU-and-French-policy, and francophone-European-civil-society register. The two Voices give the corpus the matched pair of pause-movement leadership anchors — the founder-and-board-chair register and the CEO-and-chapter-builder register — sitting beside each other inside the same organisational vehicle and complementing the AI-safety policy-and-parliamentary register that Andrea Miotti carries through ControlAI, the corpus-linked sister-organisation of PauseAI on the inside-game side.
• The machine-learning-engineer-turned-organiser sub-type with EU-policy reach. Structurally distinct from the corpus's existing pause-movement voice anchor — Joep Meindertsma's software-entrepreneur-turned-organiser register rooted in the Dutch civic-tech field — Fournes's distinctive register is the Cambridge-trained mathematician and former chief-data-scientist in London whose machine-learning-engineering career sat directly inside the deep-learning industry he now organises against, and whose post-promotion register carries the substantive technical credibility on the capability arguments through the European Parliament, French National Assembly, and international press surfaces. The technical-credibility side anchors the substantive case on AGI timelines and compute-supply-chain leverage; the organiser side anchors the named-byline grassroots-mobilisation register through which the pause case carries into the French and francophone European public field; and the CeSIA-fellowship side anchors the international red-lines policy register that complements the public-protest surface PauseAI's federation runs.

Public output and venues

Fournes's public-facing work runs through four overlapping channels.

• The French-language named podcast and YouTube interview register. The headline anchor of Fournes's French-language public-output register is the recurring long-form named-byline podcast appearance schedule he has built since founding PauseIA France in late 2023. The substantive arcs of the Synth IMAGINAIRES conversation with Gérald Holubowicz (10 September 2024) on the existential-risk-from-AI case and the moratorium proposal, the long-form arc with Gaëtan Selle on The Flares running through PauseAI's policy proposals (11:20), the principal dangers from advanced AI systems (14:30), the open-source AI question (25:23), the obstacles to consensus on pausing (42:53), the EU AI Act's role (53:56), the strongest counterarguments (1:03:54), and the limits of acceptable activism (1:21:39), the Éthique et Psycho episode of 31 January 2025 on "Faire face aux risques de l'intelligence artificielle", and the recurring French YouTube interview register through "IA sur pause : d'accord ou pas ?", the "Il est urgent de mettre l'IA en pause" interview, the "L'IA NOUS ÉCHAPPE" multi-sector framing (cybersecurity, finance, labour, military), and the "Il Faut Mettre l'IA En Pause Au Plus Vite" interview anchor the substantive French-language case Fournes has built — described by PauseAI's own CEO-announcement piece as appearances "on TV discussions and a plethora of podcasts, with many episodes surpassing 100,000 views".
• The mass-mobilisation and protest register through the Paris AI Action Summit. Fournes's named-byline public-mobilisation register runs most prominently through the 10 February 2025 Place de la Bastille mobilization at the Paris AI Action Summit, where on the substantive register he carried the framing that the pause movement is "not targeting the consumers, we are not targeting everyone, we are not saying: 'Stop using AI.' We're stopping the people who are creating these weapons of mass destruction", and where he called for an international treaty to halt the development of AI systems, suggesting it should be signed between the United States and China. The mobilisation forms part of camp-pauseai-international-protests-2023-ongoing and is the substantive French-civil-society audience-facing surface of the policy case that runs in parallel through his European Parliament, French National Assembly, and CeSIA work.
• The European Parliament and French National Assembly policy register. Fournes's named-byline policy-and-parliamentary register runs through the 24 February 2026 European Parliament address in Brussels alongside Stuart Russell and MEPs Ondřej Kolář, Saskia Bricmont, and Brando Benifei, with European Parliament Vice-President Victor Negrescu present, where Fournes anchored the substantive policy case that "the current race to build ever more powerful AI systems, without adequate safeguards, poses an unacceptable risk", that frontier AI labs estimate "in two-to-five years we will have AGI", that the EU AI Act "was not designed to address the existential risk posed by the race to build artificial superintelligence", and that the GDPR and Paris Climate Agreement precedents show the EU can establish frameworks that create "gravitational pull" even without initial US participation. The French National Assembly testimony Fournes gave on behalf of CeSIA — the Centre pour la sécurité de l'IA — through the Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices anchors the named-byline framing that until the entry into force of AI regulations, AI providers were "less regulated than a hair salon in Europe", and runs alongside the substantive international red-lines coordination work he conducted at CeSIA on UN processes, AI Summits, G7 engagement, and middle-power AI-safety cooperation.
• The post-promotion English-language international press register. Following Fournes's December 2025 promotion to PauseAI Global CEO, his named-byline English-language press register runs through the Dazed Digital article of 12 March 2026 on AI's effect on workforce competition, where Fournes anchors the substantive framing that AI inevitability is a constructed narrative serving those profiting from advancement; and through the CNN reporting of 17 April 2026 on the alleged attack on Sam Altman's residence, where Fournes's named statement as CEO framed the incident as "the opposite of everything we stand for" and anchored PauseAI's distinguishing posture from Stop AI as a peaceful, democratic outlet for AI concerns.

Signature framings

Three formulations recur across Fournes's public output and have done the most to install his register into the international AI-safety, frontier-AI-governance, and pause-movement field.

• "A race between people who are building a God-like entity that will basically most likely kill everyone, and us" — the coordination-vs-capability race framing. Fournes's framing in PauseAI's own CEO-announcement piece of the central organising argument — that the contemporary frontier-AI capability race is best understood as a race between the builders of a "God-like entity" that will "basically most likely kill everyone" and the international coalition trying to coordinate to stop them, and that the coordination side needs to "get this coordination to be on an exponential path as well" — is the most condensed single articulation of the urgency-of-coordination case the corpus's pause-movement voice register turns on. The framing anchors the substantive case the PauseAI policy proposal makes for an international AI-safety agency, an enforceable treaty pausing training above a defined capability-or-compute threshold, and the compute-governance route, and runs directly through into the pause-movement-and-grassroots-mobilisation register of the international federation.
• "Not targeting consumers... stopping the people who are creating these weapons of mass destruction" — the targeted-actor framing. Fournes's framing at the Place de la Bastille mobilization at the Paris AI Action Summit anchors the substantive proposition that the pause movement's organising target is the small number of frontier-AI developers building the most powerful general AI systems, not the wider population of AI users and consumers — a framing that displaces both the "AI is going to take your job" framing of the populist AI-anxiety conversation and the "stop using AI" framing that the wider AI-critical field has at times absorbed, in favour of the substantive proposition that the policy intervention is owed to the producer-side of the frontier-AI value chain and the international-treaty coordination problem. The framing carries directly through into the named-byline US-China-treaty proposal Fournes carried into French and international press at the Paris summit and into the named-byline European Parliament address on the regulatory gap left by the EU AI Act for existential risk from artificial superintelligence.
• "Hyperstition" and the constructed-inevitability framing. Fournes's framing in the Dazed Digital March 2026 piece — that AI inevitability is a "hyperstition", "a prediction that becomes true when enough people believe in it", and that the assertion that "you can't stop progress" is "just nonsense" — anchors the substantive proposition that the political-and-cultural background to the AI race is itself a constructed-narrative artefact serving those who profit from frontier-AI advancement, displacing the assumption that the technological trajectory is independent of the public's beliefs about it. The framing carries directly through into the substantive case made in Fournes's named-byline press register and his podcast and YouTube interview register, and into PauseAI's organising posture of public protest, mass petition, and sustained engagement with the wider audience on the question of whether the race is inevitable at all.

Organisational vehicle

Fournes's public output runs primarily through PauseAI, where he serves as Chief Executive Officer of PauseAI Global since the December 2025 handover from founding-CEO Joep Meindertsma, and through the PauseAI federation of national chapters (PauseIA France now under Clémence Peyrot following Fournes's promotion; PauseAI US under Holly Elmore; PauseAI UK under Joseph Miller; PauseAI Canada under Jeremy Eliosoff; PauseAI Germany under Benjamin Schmidt; and chapters across Australia, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands). The organisational vehicle carries the substantive connective tissue between Fournes's prior machine-learning-engineering career, the international federation's volunteer-led national-chapter infrastructure, and the international AI-safety field — anchored in corpus through the related-orgs link to ControlAI on the policy-and-parliamentary side and through the matched pair with voice-joep-meindertsma on the founding-Board-Chair side. Beyond PauseAI, Fournes also holds a fellowship at Centre pour la sécurité de l'IA (CeSIA), the Paris-based French AI-safety centre, through which he conducts the international-red-lines policy work and gave the named-byline French National Assembly testimony — the named secondary institutional vehicle through which the substantive French-and-European policy register of his public output runs alongside PauseAI's grassroots-mobilisation surface.