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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Lex McMenamin in New York City, with photographs by Julius Constantine Motal

‘Eat the rich, save the planet’: climate protesters call out big tech’s disconnect from reality

A composite image showing people chanting on the left and a button that reads 'AI rots your brain' on the right
Protests come after a former Anthropic employee warned that AI could ‘kill us all’ within a decade. Photograph: Julius Constantine Motal/The Guardian

On Monday evening, protesters gathered outside the unmarked Manhattan offices of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, holding signs calling to “Eat the rich, save the planet”. Over the next two days, groups also picketed outside the offices of fellow tech giants Google and Amazon; other protesters, including clergy, were arrested while disrupting a closed-door AI health summit in the city. Tonight, protesters will target a Brooklyn gas power plant that was set to close – until it was purchased to power AI datacenters.

The protests come on the heels of an Anthropic employee quitting his job with a warning that intensified an already-growing AI panic: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

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