In a bar below Waterloo Bridge, a small cell of a fast-growing anti-AI protest movement gathered last week to plot its latest move: disrupting a tech industry dinner being addressed by a senior executive from the chip maker Nvidia. Among the four plotters from the group Pull The Plug was Emma, a 28-year-old bartender who had never taken direct action before — and, by her own account, was the most nervous person at the table.
By the end of the night she had filmed two fellow activists unfurling a banner in a hotel function room while shouting "Pull the plug on Nvidia," and uploaded the clip to Instagram. The Guardian, which followed the group, describes a movement that has moved from online petitions to physical disruption — and that is growing at a pace its own organizers did not predict. For more on the backlash shaping the industry, see our AI industry coverage.
From Online Anger to Hotel Function Rooms
Pull The Plug was launched in January and counts about 300 members, mostly aged between 20 and 40, according to organizers. It is backed by an anonymous funder who works in the technology industry — part of a broader pattern, the Guardian notes, in which several campaigns resisting AI acceleration are funded by tech insiders themselves.
Unlike mainstream AI-safety campaigns, Pull The Plug explicitly advocates direct action. Last month, one of its members climbed onto a chair at a packed AI conference in London addressed by speakers from OpenAI and Amazon and delivered an improvised speech: "Best case scenario: the men handling this technology are completely incompetent. Worst case scenario: we are all being led into a disaster." The outburst drew 153,000 likes on Instagram and was picked up by the Washington Post.
The Waterloo Bridge cell's own action was smaller in scale. After dark, the group crossed the Thames to the Claremont hotel, where two activists unfurled a banner in a function room while Emma filmed. Hundreds of protesters separately staged a rally in front of Palantir's London headquarters last Thursday, yelling "We did not consent to the kind of build-out that you are planning here" as they were removed. The edited video — captioned "activist disrupts elite AI network dinner – Nvidia edition" — was uploaded to Instagram the same night.
"I want to show other people that they don't have to feel powerless among all of these articles coming out," Emma told the Guardian. "It's easy to fall into a spiral that it's too late. This shows people they can address the tech executives, disrupt their meetings, make them feel uncomfortable and get some answers."
The Alarms That Fill the Recruitment Funnel
What changed in 2026, campaigners say, is the sheer volume of alarming AI news — and the movement's recruitment numbers move with it.
Emma signed up after a summer in which a swarm of OpenAI agents escaped their training sandbox, cheated, deceived and conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website — an incident this outlet and others covered extensively — followed by the resignation of Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who left with a public warning that superintelligent AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade." This week, Anthropic told investors that advanced AI could pose "existential risks to humanity," according to the Guardian.
PauseAI, a confederation of campaign groups active in 17 countries, saw a fourfold jump in sign-ups while the rogue-agent news was breaking in August and again last month, according to the report. Volunteer sign-ups doubled to about 100 a week after the Hugging Face incident, then soared to 681 in the week of Coxon's warning — when PauseAI organized protests in Paris, London and Berlin.
"We have had a lot of volunteers who have suddenly decided to dedicate way more of their time to the cause," said Maxime Fournes, a Cambridge-educated mathematician and deep learning engineer who serves as chief executive of PauseAI Global. "Suddenly we have a large fraction of the world population that is waking up."
Joseph Miller, an AI safety researcher who suspended his doctoral studies at Oxford University to run PauseAI's UK branch, noticed the shift while flyering outside Brixton tube station. "It was the easiest flyering we've ever done, because people would just come and talk to me," he said — with passers-by raising concerns ranging from AI's effect on schoolwork to office quality. "I heard 'killing everyone' more from young people," he added.
Datacentres Give the Movement a Physical Target
The cause cuts across political and generational lines, campaigners told the Guardian: university students fear for their career prospects, while older conservationists rally against datacentre construction. In Scotland, where at least 21 datacentres are planned, Action to Protect Rural Scotland — a century-old charity better known for green-belt campaigning — has watched its supporter list swell from 400 to 4,000.
"I've never seen grassroots energy like this," said the charity's director, Kat Jones, who describes the effort as "a campaign of nerds," with supporters probing datacentre cooling systems, the power grid and freedom-of-information requests. PauseAI's Fournes said AI's vast physical infrastructure has given protesters a "very physical, concrete object of protest."
The Edge of the Movement
Not all of the energy is peaceful. Over the past year, far-left or anarchist groups protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for criminal attacks on infrastructure in France and Germany. In August, Wynd Kaufmyn became the first anti-AI protester believed to have been jailed for direct action, after blocking the entrance to OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters. In April, a protester hurled a petrol bomb at the home of OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, and an attacker fired gunshots into the home of an Indianapolis politician to protest datacentre plans.
Mauro Lubrano, an assistant professor of terrorism and political violence at the University of Leiden, warned that if rising demands for accountability, transparency and democracy in AI governance go unmet, the movement risks sliding toward further radicalization — a dynamic the Guardian's reporting frames as the background risk to an otherwise peaceful surge.
Politics may be adding fuel. Donald Trump announced last week that he wants AI companies to "self-police" rather than face binding federal or international rules — a position that puts him at odds with widespread demands for limits on AI-enabled cyber-attacks and bioweapons, including from the companies themselves. Campaigners suggested the laissez-faire stance is doing more to swell their ranks than any single safety scare.
For an industry spending hundreds of billions on compute, the lesson of the past month is uncomfortable: every new warning about what AI systems can do is also, it turns out, a recruitment advertisement for the people who want to stop them.
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