Protestors Outside Anthropic Warn of AI That Keeps Improving Itself - Futurism
On March 21, 2026, Joseph Reichstadter ended a 30-day hunger strike outside Anthropic's San Francisco offices and joined a march of nearly 200 people to OpenAI and xAI's nearby headquarters. It was, by the organizers' count, the largest AI pause protest in US history. One month earlier, Anthropic had quietly published a new version of its Responsible Scaling Policy that removed the clause requiring it to pause development if risks became unacceptably high. The gap between those two facts is the story.
The change to the RSP v3.0, released Feb. 24, 2026, has been parsed in detail by the AI governance research community. As the GovAI research center noted in its analysis, the structural shift is significant: under the previous version, Anthropic started from a high level of safety mitigations and would only reduce them if competitors weren't adopting similar measures. Under v3.0, Anthropic starts from a lower level and will only adopt stronger ones if other companies do the same. The baseline moved. Chris Painter of the METR research organization, which studies frontier AI risk, put it plainly to TIME Magazine: the change signals Anthropic believes it needs to shift into triage mode, because methods to assess and mitigate AI risk are not keeping up with the pace of capabilities.
The company is not acting like a company preparing for triage. In February 2026, Anthropic closed $30 billion in new investments, valuing it at $380 billion, with annualized revenue reportedly growing at 10x per year. It is, by any conventional measure, in a period of extraordinary growth and ambition. Dario Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive, has privately assigned a 10 to 25 percent probability to extinction-level catastrophe from advanced AI, first reported by The Verge based on a 2023 interview with Amodei, and later confirmed by Axios and Censinet. Those are the stakes he has articulated privately, in settings where he is not performing for regulators or investors. The mechanism Anthropic removed from its governing document was the only formal commitment the company had to actually pause if those risks materialized.
Michaël Trazzi, a filmmaker and former AI safety researcher, organized the Stop the AI Race protest. He had previously led a three-week hunger strike at Google DeepMind's London offices in September 2025. At the March 21 rally, he characterized the current dynamic as a suicide race — companies cutting corners on safety to build systems they cannot control — in reporting by Decrypt. That framing appeared in reporting by Decrypt.
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate widely known as a godfather of modern neural networks, has spoken publicly about three categories of harm from advanced AI: bad actors using it for cybercrime, election interference, and autonomous weapons; massive job displacement; and AI itself surpassing human intelligence in ways that could prove uncontrollable. His comments were reported by India Today at the time of the protest.
Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, publicly endorsed the Stop the AI Race demand, calling it a decent ask: AI CEOs should commit to pause if everyone else will too. That language mirrors the condition Anthropic just removed from its own RSP.
The route of the March 21 protest traced a rough line across San Francisco's AI corridor: from Anthropic's headquarters at 500 Howard St., to OpenAI at 1455 3rd St., then to xAI at 3180 18th St., ending at Dolores Park. California State Senator Scott Wiener, who has sponsored AI safety legislation in Sacramento, criticized the federal government's approach, saying the Trump administration is not interested in smart public policy that both fosters innovation and addresses risk.
The irony is structural. Anthropic's CEO assigns meaningful probability to extinction-level outcomes from the technology his company is building. Anthropic's governance document was, for years, the most specific formal commitment any lab had made to constrain its own capabilities if risk thresholds were crossed. That commitment is gone. The hunger striker finished his protest and went home. The money keeps flowing in.