In brief
- Guido Reichstadter is maintaining his hunger strike at Anthropic’s San Francisco offices.
- Michael Trazzi and Denys Sheremet staged similar fasts at DeepMind’s London HQ, but ended them this week.
- AI doomers are raising the alarm about the potential dangers of AI superintelligence.
Guido Reichstadter is 24 days into a hunger strike outside the San Francisco headquarters of Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot. Each day he sets up on the sidewalk at 500 Howard Street, where delivery riders come and go, bringing food to the unmarked office tower.
“There is a great and profound evil in this place,” he wrote on X on Wednesday. “These developers are knowingly racing towards superhumanly capable general AI systems they have no credible plan to control.”
The 56-year-old activist, who runs the group Stop AI, has consumed nothing but electrolytes and vitamins since September 1. His demand is straightforward: Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, should acknowledge the existential risks posed by advanced AI and call for an immediate halt to the race toward superintelligence. In Reichstadter’s telling, the company is cloaking itself in silence while endangering the very people who unknowingly sustain it.
“Have they no shame?” he asked in his latest post.
Reichstadter is not new to dramatic protest. Earlier this year, he chained open the doors at OpenAI’s office and staged demonstrations at Google DeepMind. Nor is he alone: He was joined by Michael Trazzi and Denys Sheremet, who began parallel hunger strikes outside DeepMind’s London office.
On Monday, however, Sheremet called it quits—and Trazzi confirmed Tuesday that he did the same.
“After 16 days with zero calories, I have decided to stop the hunger strike outside of Google DeepMind,” Sheremet wrote. “I still hope the leadership of DeepMind will make a first step towards de-escalating the race towards extremely dangerous AI.”
Local outlets like the San Francisco Standard and SFGate have documented Reichstadter’s vigil, noting his insistence that Amodei personally meet with him to explain why Anthropic continues its current course.
For now, Anthropic has not commented publicly on the strike. (We’ve reached out for comment and will update should they reply.) The company markets itself as an industry leader on AI safety, but Reichstadter accuses it of spreading “the lie that the race to superintelligence can be done ‘safely’ or ‘responsibly.’” His protest highlights the growing rift between AI labs intent on scaling models and activists who view the effort as an existential gamble.
On discussion forums like the Effective Altruism Forum, the activist’s opening missive was also published, calling for an immediate cessation of “reckless actions” by Anthropic and urging society to treat the AI race as an emergency.
Whether his fast forces that debate into the open—or ends in personal tragedy—remains uncertain. Hunger strikes are designed to shock public conscience, but their power depends on whether the surrounding community chooses to pay attention.
For 24 days and counting, Reichstadter has wagered his health on the chance that they will.
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