“The actions that we took from October to February – nonviolently blocking the doors of OpenAI — have gotten attention around the world,” Reichstadter said. “They are the reason why Sam Altman was served a subpoena to appear to testify to the fact that he is consciously endangering the existence of humanity.”
OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment. An attorney representing Altman, Gabriel Bronshteyn, declined to comment.
In a statement, Stop AI said the trial “will be the first time in human history where a jury of normal people are asked about the extinction threat that AI poses to humanity.”
Stop AI consists mostly of a small group of people who once lived together in a house in West Oakland. Reichstadter said he left his two teenage children in Miami to move to Oakland to join the fight against the development of potentially harmful AI, while Kirchner — a former electrical engineering tech and neuroscience student — moved from Seattle to found Stop AI in the Bay Area last year. Kaufmyn spent more than 40 years teaching computer sciences at City College of San Francisco.
Stop AI members often cite Nobel laureate and “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton, who has said there’s a 20% chance that forms of AI currently being developed could “wipe us out.”
Of specific concern is artificial general intelligence, which OpenAI is trying to develop and defines as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans.” Other definitions suggest it applies to the moment when AI learns to solve problems beyond the limitations it has today.
While OpenAI says it is developing AGI so it “benefits all of humanity,” Stop AI wants the government to shut it down immediately.
“There is no way to prove that something smarter than us will stay safe forever and won’t eventually want something that will lead to our extinction, similar to how we’ve caused the extinction of many less intelligent species, and that’s the risk here,” Kirchner said in an interview at a protest outside OpenAI in February. “They don’t have proof that it will stay safe forever. They’re literally building Skynet in there.”
Even while already facing charges from protests in 2024, Stop AI members continued to protest OpenAI, including in February when they chained the doors to the company’s headquarters on 3rd Street near Chase Center and sat in front of the doors until police removed some of them from the premises.
“We’re gonna lock the doors now to this company,” Kirchner said through a bullhorn. “This company should not exist if it’s trying to build something that they admit could kill us all. So we’re gonna put our bodies on the line and try to prevent them from building that AGI system. And we invite everyone who thinks that what they’re doing is not OK to join us in this act of civil disobedience.”
The protest occurred on a Saturday, when OpenAI’s offices were closed.