The Strange Disappearance of an Anti-AI Activist

Before Sam Kirchner vanished, before the San Francisco Police Department began to warn that he could be armed and dangerous, before OpenAI locked down its offices over the potential threat, those who encountered him saw him as an ordinary, if ardent, activist.

Phoebe Thomas Sorgen met Kirchner a few months ago at Travis Air Force Base, northeast of San Francisco, at a protest against immigration policy and U.S. military aid to Israel. Sorgen, a longtime activist whose first protests were against the Vietnam War, was going to block an entrance to the base with six other older women. Kirchner, 27 years old, was there with a couple of other members of a new group called Stop AI, and they all agreed to go along to record video on their phones in case of a confrontation with the police.

“They were mainly there, I believe, to recruit people who might be willing to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience, which they see as the key to stopping super AI,” Sorgen told me, a method she thought was really smart. Afterward, she started going to Stop AI’s weekly meetings in Berkeley and learning about the artificial-intelligence industry, adopting the activist group’s cause as one of her own. She was impressed by Kirchner and the other leaders, who struck her as passionate and well informed. They’d done their research on AI and on protest movements; they knew what they were talking about and what to do. “They were committed to nonviolence on the merits as well as strategically,” she said.

They followed a typical activist playbook. They passed out flyers and served pizza and beer at a T-shirt-making party. They organized monthly demonstrations and debated various ideas for publicity stunts. Stop AI, which calls for a permanent global ban on the development of artificial superintelligence, has always been a little more radical—more open to offending, its members clearly willing to get arrested—than some of the other groups protesting the development of artificial general intelligence, but Sorgen told me that leaders were also clear, at every turn, that violence was not morally acceptable or part of a winning strategy. (“That’s the empire’s game, violence,” she noted. “We can’t compete on that level even if we wanted to.”) Organizers who gathered in a Stop AI Signal chat were given only one warning for musing or even joking about violent actions. After that, they would be banned.

Kirchner, who moved to San Francisco from Seattle and co-founded Stop AI there last year, publicly expressed his own commitment to nonviolence many times, and friends and allies say they believed him.