Pause AI and Stop AI: Meet the anti-AI groups facing questions after the attack on Sam Altman |
Pause AI and Stop AI: Meet the anti-AI groups facing questions after the attack on Sam Altman
The attempted firebombing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home last Friday, allegedly carried out by 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, has drawn attention to two anti-AI groups with similar names: Pause AI and Stop AI. Both have condemned the violence and said the suspect is not and never was a member of their organizations.
Still, the incident, in which Moreno-Gama also went to OpenAI’s headquarters and tried to shatter the building’s glass doors with a chair and threatened to burn the facility, surfaced his activity on Pause AI’s Discord server and renewed scrutiny of Stop AI’s direct actions targeting OpenAI last year.
A movement built on slowing AI
Pause AI, founded in Utrecht, Netherlands, in May 2023 by Joep Meindertsma, aims to halt what it calls “dangerous frontier AI” and staged its first protest outside Microsoft’s lobbying office in Brussels. The group, whose name was inspired by an open letter from the Future of Life Institute in March 2023 (which is also now its largest single funder), has since grown into a global grassroots movement with local chapters. That includes a separate organization called Pause AI US, led by Berkeley-based Holly Elmore, who has a PhD in evolutionary biology from Harvard and previously worked at a think tank focused on wildlife animal welfare.
Moreno-Gama was linked to comments on Pause AI’s Discord server, including one post, dated Dec. 3, 2025, that read: “We are close to midnight, it’s time to actually act.” Pause AI said the suspect joined its server two years ago and posted a total of 34 messages, none of which “contained explicit calls to violence.”
Elmore told Fortune that she had been on her way to Washington, D.C., last week to finish preparing for a peaceful demonstration on Capitol Hill and meetings with members of Congress when the attempted firebombing occurred. “When I landed, suddenly I was getting these questions about somebody who had attacked Sam Altman’s house,” she said. “It’s been back and forth between working on something that I feel really proud and positive about, and it’s just exactly the right kind of change to be making—democratic change through democratic means—and then having to comment on this horrible event and additionally being really smeared with a connection to this event.”
The group has “no reason to think that this person had much to do with us,” she added, pointing out that Pause AI’s stance on violence “has always been incredibly........