Resistance to AI gathers strength

The world is becoming increasingly aware of the dangers posed by the development of artificial intelligence (AI), ranging from the terrifying risk of human extinction to potential disruption of labor markets, cognitive and mental health impacts, threats to democracies and privacy, military and civilian security problems, and the massive concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few, among many other issues. Voices warning about these threats have been common for years, and in recent weeks the chorus has grown louder on the basis of new troubling evidence. Alongside growing awareness, a multifaceted civic resistance to an unregulated technological race is advancing worldwide.

A trickle of warnings and resignations from prominent employees at leading AI labs has dominated the headlines. But that trend is only one part of a much broader sociopolitical movement. Citizens in many countries are mobilizing to block the construction of new data centers; workers in education and the arts are striking; hackers are poisoning data to short-circuit model development; philanthropists are funding projects to design new containment guardrails; designers are creating T-shirts with colors and patterns that sabotage AI visual recognition systems; parents are taking legal action for harm their children suffered from using a chatbot… The range of cases is wide and growing, spanning dissent, resistance, and even sabotage.

“We are clearly seeing resistance movements gaining momentum and spreading around the world,” says Ayse Gizem Yasar, Senior AI Fellow at the École normale supérieure in Paris and co-author of the study From rejection to regulation: mapping the landscape of resistance to AI, published in 2025 by Sciences Po, Paris.

“There is something genuinely new about how diverse AI resistance is. It’s a technology with a very wide array of consequences, and that elicits responses from a broad spectrum of people. That helps explain why it continues to grow and why, in my view, it will keep doing so,” says Thomas Dekeyser, a professor at the University of Southampton and author of Techno-negative (University of Minnesota Press), an essay that explores the history of human resistance to certain forms of technological development. Even in fights against the same data center, Dekeyser stresses, motivations can vary widely: environmental protection, fear of rising electricity bills, concerns about property devaluation, or anxiety about an exterminating apocalypse.

The movement, then, is intensifying and widening. “I find it culturally significant because it’s noticeable enough that the public is hearing about it. And among other things, that incentivizes politicians to take a more critical stance,” says Carissa Véliz, associate professor of philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford and author of Prophecy: Lessons on the Use and Abuse of Prediction, from Ancient Oracles to AI (Debate).

This dynamic is becoming evident in the United States, where local, bipartisan civic mobilizations to block data-center construction have strengthened elected officials’ motivation to oppose such developments. The organization Data Center Watch — a project run by AI firm 10sLabs — estimates that in the first quarter of 2026 some 75 data-center projects, with an estimated investment value of $130 billion, were blocked or delayed in the U.S., a figure equivalent to the total for 2025.

Several legislative initiatives have been introduced in the U.S. to curb, condition, delay, or ban the construction of data centers, and work is underway on the issue in the federal Congress as well. The matter is one of the central issues in the campaign for the November legislative elections. But opposition to data-center construction is genuinely global, with protest actions in many countries, including in Europe.

It is a particularly tangible element of the resistance, but it is only the visible tip of a much larger iceberg. Staff at the University of Sydney went on strike in early September demanding protection and safeguards against AI. In August, a group of student activists occupied a Washington building used by OpenAI for lobbying purposes: 13 of them were arrested, according to local press reports. The trickle is continuous.

An Ipsos opinion poll with fieldwork conducted last spring finds that in many wealthy democracies — such as the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Canada, France and the Netherlands — those who believe AI creates more problems than benefits already predominate. Across the 32 countries studied, a positive view still prevails on average, with Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian respondents being the most optimistic and strongly shaping the collective balance. But even so, there is a widespread decline in optimism compared with the 2025 study.

Geopolitical race

The transmission belt between civic rejection and politics is already yielding results at various levels, but the decisive game is being played at the highest level: among heads of state and leading companies, where decision-making parameters are less susceptible to public pressure.

The main protagonists in this race are the United States and China, and extreme mistrust between geopolitical and corporate actors has so far prevented substantial decisions. Everyone fears that pausing could leave competitors free to gain a decisive advantage that would grant an almost unimaginable hegemony.

Nevertheless, even with that powerful factor fueling inertia, signs of change are detectable. Bloomberg reported last Friday that OpenAI’s chief, Sam Altman, told employees he was willing to slow developments. The context for this came amid the severe reputational damage tied to the troubling Hugging Face incident, in which the firm was hacked by OpenAI agents against the company’s will and without them even realizing it.

Experts have long noted the emergence of these dangers. Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and one of the founding figures of language-model technology, warned about them in an interview with this newspaper in February. “There is empirical evidence of AI acting against our instructions,” was the headline.

Dario Amodei, head of Anthropic, published an online piece on September 12 in which he also advocates slowing “the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” Amodei says two things have convinced him that greater caution is necessary: one is that we have entered a phase in which AI itself develops AI; the other is the Hugging Face incident.

On that premise, Amodei proposes a three-step control framework: that large companies grant access to external inspectors; coordination to establish common safety standards among firms in democratic countries; and an attempt to coordinate with authoritarian states.

Altman immediately responded on X, expressing his support for slowing down development and specifically for the commitment to grant external inspectors access.

Evidence of the danger is multiplying, becoming more compelling, spreading in public opinion, provoking outrage and fear in society, and that is generating greater pressure.

Beyond that, it is clear that concern about the risks is, in itself, moving things. Even a hyperliberal administration like Donald Trump’s has begun to consider restrictions in this area. And the leaders of the largest companies — from Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind to Altman himself — had already been proposing risk-reduction architectures before these most recent episodes.

Hassabis, for example, has suggested a body of standards partially inspired by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a private entity that designs and implements — with powers granted by public authorities — rules for brokers. Hassabis envisions a hybrid instrument that could oversee models, especially before they are deployed. In his view, it cannot be an industry-only body, but nor can it be solely public, because it would lack the expertise to act quickly.

It is also worth noting that the U.S. and China are dialoguing on AI. Reuters has reported preparations for a possible meeting between delegations in the coming days, and Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet at the White House on September 24, with AI expected to be among the topics to be discussed. In August, there was a hybrid-format meeting in Beijing (“track 1.5″ in diplomatic jargon, i.e., halfway between purely public channels and civil-society channels).

The geopolitical dimension of the matter is crucial. AI is emerging as a technology with a unique potential to reconfigure power balances between nations, both through its capacity to boost productivity and wealth and through its contributions to military capabilities. Global domination is at stake, in a way and with an intensity unparalleled in history.

Some experts reason by drawing parallels with the nuclear dimension. The analogy applies to the destructive potential, although there is an enormous difference in the constructive domain. In that sense, ideas resonate about mutually assured destruction, pacts between the two superpowers to limit deployment and establish transparency and confidence measures, international treaties inspired by the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty, or institutions like the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In any case, for the moment there is nothing substantial on the existential-risk front, nor are there high-profile responses to other challenges — from the risk of massive impacts on labor markets, linked to advances in AI and robotics, to democratic threats posed by the extraordinary potential to manipulate minds the new technology enables. The EU passed groundbreaking legislation during the previous legislative term, but it is hesitating to implement it; and in any case, while it may be a significant market, it is not a major player in the industry.

The struggle has only just begun, and one central question is whether these diverse forms of resistance can somehow converge to be more effective. Dekeyser notes that, in the historical arc he traces in his essay, the lesson of the Luddites — the textile workers in 19th-century Britain who fought machines that threatened their livelihoods — stands out. “They were very good at organizing and responding collectively to the problem,” he says, emphasizing that the collective dimension is more effective than individual actions. For example, the personal decision not to use certain products.

Dekeyser thinks it unlikely that “some sort of united front against AI” will form, but that does not preclude tactical convergence. “History shows that it is not necessary to agree on everything for certain movements to achieve certain successes.”

Véliz points to the institutionalization of human rights as an example of consensus built on different visions. “There are different ways to justify them, different points of view, but that does not prevent finding agreement,” the Oxford academic says.

Can Şimşek, an AI policy expert and member of UNESCO’s Expert Group on AI Ethics Without Borders, also invokes human rights. “We are facing a highly changing environment, and forms of resistance also change and must adapt. It is difficult to foresee developments and therefore to generate a shared analysis, a shared semantics and a shared policy. But we have the conceptual framework of human rights that can be applied to this sector,” says Şimşek, who co-authored the Sciences Po report with Yasar. The two experts are working on a new edition that will be published at the end of this year.

“Resistance is not only stopping something. It is also shaping it,” Yasar of the École normale supérieure says. The scholar stresses the crucial importance of creating a transmission belt between protest and regulatory activity, and both she and Şimşek warn about “regulatory capture,” the maneuvers by large firms to influence legislation.

Technology advances. Awareness of its risks does too, with constant warnings: the latest from Anthropic, which said it had thwarted attempts to use its models to create biological weapons. Resistance to this development, full of dangers, is gaining strength. Slowing it down and establishing effective guardrails is an arduous undertaking. Human rights were enshrined in the Charter of the nascent United Nations after two terrifying world wars; the Treaty on the Non‑Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was approved after the horrific use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Time will tell whether, in this case, humanity can act meaningfully without being compelled by catastrophe.

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