Organizer Michael Trazzi on building a coalition across data centers, jobs and extinction risk, and why he now protests outside Anthropic every day.
Most protests about artificial intelligence have been small. Twenty people, a handful of signs, and a photograph that makes the concern look narrower than it is.
On July 11 in San Francisco, that changed. Press estimates put the crowd between one hundred and several hundred people, marching past the offices of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. There was a brass band. Speakers included a former San Francisco supervisor, a food and water advocacy organizer, a labor organizer working with gig workers, and a 19 year old law student.
On episode 90 of For Humanity, John Sherman spoke with Michael Trazzi, one of the organizers behind it.
According to Trazzi, roughly 30 percent of the speakers came from the AI safety community. The other 70 percent did not. That ratio was deliberate.
There is a long running position within AI safety advocacy that extinction risk is the only subject worth raising, and that broader coalitions dilute the message. Sherman puts the sharpest version of that objection to his guest directly: if you invite people in because they are worried about their jobs or their water bill, and your own concern is that this technology could end human life, have you not implicitly told them their cause is smaller than yours?
Trazzi does not argue that every concern carries equal weight. His argument is that the question does not need to be settled before people can act together.
"We do not have to agree about why to agree about the solution."
If the demand is that companies stop racing to build more powerful systems, then a person worried about job displacement is asking for the same thing as a person worried about loss of control. The reasons differ. The ask does not.
He goes further. When some people within the AI safety community objected that a water advocacy group had been given a speaking slot, Trazzi treated it as a sign the design was working.
"If you are not making people upset, it means you are too narrow. If you have a diverse set of speakers, then one of them will say something you did not agree with."
Sherman's argument is that most people feel powerless in the face of the largest technology companies, and that almost nobody has a personal experience of pushing back and winning. Local opposition to data centers is the exception. Communities have blocked or delayed builds, and companies have gone looking for other counties. In his framing, these are among the first occasions where ordinary people concerned about the growth of AI have caused a corporate board to change a plan.
The scale of that opposition is now measurable. Analysis from Data Center Watch found that opponents have blocked or delayed roughly $130 billion in data center projects during 2026. Polling published by Data for Progress in June 2026 found that 63 percent of US voters support pausing AI data center construction for at least a year, including 58 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats.
Trazzi's point is about concreteness. A model solving a long standing mathematics problem is invisible to most people. An electricity bill rising fifty dollars a month is not.
"That is concrete. That is a thing you did not consent to."
That framing became the line the coalition organized around: stop developing AI without our consent.
The march featured the St. Gabriel's Celestial Brass Band, percussion instruments the organizers bought for attendees to play, and a slushie theme, because the date coincided with 7-Eleven's free Slurpee day. Some commentators online suggested it looked more like a parade.
Both men treat that as a compliment. Sherman's reaction was that it felt like a party rather than a funeral. Trazzi, who grew up with Carnival, describes it as a deliberate attempt to make participation enjoyable enough to repeat.
"We do not need to be sad all the time when protesting. It is okay to be energetic. It is a celebration of the power of the people."
Days after the march, Trazzi began what he calls Occupy Anthropic, a daily protest outside the company's office in San Francisco. He says he intends to continue until Anthropic's chief executive publicly calls for an international AI treaty, on the reasoning that without agreement between countries the competitive dynamic does not stop.
Banners are positioned at both entrances so that employees leaving the building pass one. Trazzi is explicit that the intended audience is the workforce rather than the brand, pointing to the 2023 OpenAI board dispute as evidence that employees hold real influence over these companies.
Sherman offers a parallel from his own youth in Washington DC, where high school students went to the South African embassy every Friday after school to protest apartheid. Not once, but every Friday for a year and a half, until it became a fixed point in the week and, in his description, a party on the lawn.
"The regularity of it was the thing. Nobody had to ask when or where. It was the embassy, every Friday."
That is the difference between an event and a movement. An event produces a photograph. A recurring commitment produces a community, and a community is what survives the news cycle.
Trazzi says people in France and Germany have contacted him asking how to start something similar in their own cities. His answer sets the entry cost about as low as it can go.
"Everyone can go in front of the AI companies and protest them, as long as you can pay for water, a table and a chair."
"Nonviolence is at the core of what we are doing. We are doing peaceful demonstrations. We are sitting down in front of the office and people can come talk to us. We are not attacking anyone."
Trazzi describes his frustration at coverage he says paired photographs of his peaceful demonstrations with reporting about unrelated individuals. That is his characterization rather than a verified account, but Sherman recognizes the dynamic from living in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray protests, when national media spent successive nights asking on air whether that night would be the one that turned violent. His observation is that repeatedly asking the question can affect the answer.
It is one reason a protest held in daylight, outside a lobby, where anyone can walk over and start a conversation, is a stronger tactic than it first appears.
Asked how people can support the effort, Trazzi does not ask for money. He asks for time. A single person turning up means the others can eat, rest and keep the post covered.
"The bare minimum we can do as humans is to spend a day in front of the companies."
The strategic argument stands on its own. Widen the ask until it can hold people who disagree about nearly everything else. Repeat it at a fixed time and place until it becomes a community. Make it something people actually want to attend.
To support work on AI risk, you can donate to Guard Rail Now or take action at the link below.
Watch the full conversation: For Humanity #90 on The AI Risk Network
