One Year of PauseAI UK

About one year ago, I started spending most of my time organising Pause AI UK. At that time our largest protest had seen fewer than 50 attendees, no prominent politicians or scientists were associated with Pause AI, and I largely ran the UK chapter by myself.In the past year Pause AI UK has delivered two conferences, written an open letter signed by 63 UK politicians, arranged a conference in the European Parliament, and co-organised the largest AI protest in the world. We now have a strong team, with Matilda da Rui joining as Deputy Director and several highly dedicated volunteers taking on substantial responsibility and launching their own local groups around the UK.I'm proud of our track record and excited about the trajectory we are on. As AI capabilities improve exponentially, the number of people aware of the risks and motivated to take action increases commensurately. I believe we can harness this energy and turn it into real impact that actually improves humanity's chance of a positive future.Track RecordJune 2025 – PauseCon LondonWe delivered the first PauseAI conference, PauseCon, on behalf of PauseAI Global, bringing together around 60 volunteers from around the world for the first time and training them to be better organisers and communicators. We welcomed a range of excellent guest speakers from the AI safety community, including Connor Leahy, Rob Miles, David Krueger and Kat Woods.PauseAI Germany, among others, came away from the event with renewed purpose and went on to organise a petition signed by 150 German professors. One volunteer, Didier Coeurnelle, was inspired to initiate and fund the next PauseCon in Brussels.August 2025 – Open Letter to Demis HassabisIn August we published an open letter signed by over 60 UK politicians, in response to Google DeepMind failing to uphold its AI safety commitments. Several of the MPs who signed later spoke in the Westminster Hall debate that we helped to organise in December (see below).The article in TIME that b