There’s a familiar feeling for any Super Smash Bros player: your stocks are low and your damage is high, even against a weaker opponent, so now you have to actually play to win. You can’t afford another hit. You’re going for the jugular.

In the past week, Anthropic’s 2x uplift results were all over Twitter, making some people physically ill.

People with long timelines are now realizing that the uplift Anthropic employees get from AI is real, which would have some pretty wild implications for when we’d get recursive self-improvement.

People are starting to feel like it’s the endgame, “the board is set”.

I do agree with everyone else that it’s starting to look like we’re in the endgame.

The companies will keep on accumulating more and more power, through smarter AI models, more compute, and more talent.

But the fight is not yet over:

“We have very little time to stop full recursive self improvement

But ASI hasn't taken over yet

If we all work really hard we might still have a chance

But this means that every single person who is aware of what is going on must be *actually trying*

Like "we're all gonna die if we don't get our shit together so let's do everything we possibly can to stop this" type of trying”

But what would actually trying look like?

Actually Trying

There are a couple of heuristics for thinking about what “actually trying” means.

Famously, Nick Cammarata tweeted:

i hate how well asking myself “if i had 10x the agency i have what would i do” works

My own version goes:

Imagine being in a world where we don't make it. One day, humanity goes extinct from building superintelligence.

Then, someone gives you the option to come back to this date, and try again.

What would you do differently?

Like, imagine the version of you that just died from the bad worlds we wanted to avoid. And was given the chance to try again.

Maybe it was the first time you died. Or the 100th.

But this time, some oracle comes to you when you wake up and tells you that for some reason, this one is the last chance you’ll ever get.

How would you behave differently?

You’d actually try.

Playing aggressive

Many people know about Move 37, but what people don’t really talk about as much is move 78, the “hand of God” played by Lee Sedol, which AlphaGo estimated a human had a 1 in 10,000 chance of playing.

Lee Sedol had to try to play something that would be aggressive enough, or at least complicated enough, that it would manage to break through AlphaGo’s computation.

He didn’t go for the safe and predictable moves, and instead went for the high-variance aggressive moves.

He actually tried.

What would that look like for stopping the development of self-improving superintelligence?

Stopping The AI Race

People in the AI Safety community disagree about a lot of things, but most people agree that it would be great if AI companies were not racing so aggressively towards building self-improving superintelligence.

Stopping the AI Race is a good intermediary goal, whether you believe that (frontier) AI development should be paused, stopped, or you just want a coordinated slow down.

In practice, stopping would mean that:

1. AI Companies are no longer training new frontier AI models.
2. The teams that were working on new frontier models are working on something else, for instance AI Alignment.
3. This would be happening worldwide, through an AI Treaty, enforced by the signatories.

Stop The AI Race, the grassroots movement, and the name of the Substack you’re reading, started in September 2025 when Guido Reichstadter posted on X that he was on day 3 of a hunger strike outside Anthropic in San Francisco, with his chalkboard saying “Stop The Race to Artificial General Intelligence”.

This message then spread to Google DeepMind in the UK when Denys Sheremet and I started our own hunger strike, with a chalkboard saying “DeepMind Stop The AI Race”.

Guido’s ask was for Dario to stop whatever Anthropic was doing and switch to doing policy advocacy instead.

The Google DeepMind ask was different: Demis Hassabis should publicly say that he’d pause frontier AI development if the other CEOs also did.

In a way:

• It directly acknowledged that the main problem was the AI Race itself
• It suggested a plan to prevent this: have the CEOs say they’d stop if the others also did, and then have the pause be enforced by an international body / the USG.

That hunger strike outside Google DeepMind ended up lasting 7 days for me and 18 days for Denys, got international press and led to Demis Hassabis answering a journalist who asked the same question we were asking him (would he pause if everyone else also paused), to which he replied “I think so”. More details in the Hunger Strike documentary:

How the strategy has changed since then

Since September 2025, Stop The AI Race became not only something written on a chalkboard outside an AI Company, but more of a grassroots movement in the Bay Area, which then spread to the East Coast, and is now doing an international march for an AI Treaty on November 14 (if you’re in SF, NYC, DC, Boston, Chicago, Philly, Seattle, Paris, Marseille, Montréal, Toronto or Vancouver, you should sign up!).

In more detail:

• Jan 2026: At Davos, Demis, answering a journalist, says he “thinks” he’d pause if everyone else does.
• Mar 2026: We ask Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk the same thing by organizing our first march.
• Apr 2026: After the march and a follow-up to Sam, OpenAI writes it may need to “collaborate with governments, international agencies, and other AGI efforts”.
• Jun 2026: OpenAI and Anthropic write they “expect” they’d comply with an international body that slows or pauses AI. That wasn’t a commitment, so we decided to march again on July 11.
• Jul 11: We organized the largest US AI Protest, with a coalition of 13 groups, asking Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Sundar Pichai to publicly commit to pausing if everyone else does.
• Jul 20: We start occupying Anthropic every weekday (meaning we stay outside their office at 500 Howard St, in SF), asking Dario to urge the US Government to pursue an AI Treaty. On July 22, after the Hugging Face incident, we move on to Occupy OpenAI (aka stay outside their office all day every weekday), which spread in August to NYC.
• Early Sep: Sam and Dario call on the US Government to pace the frontier. We end Occupy OpenAI in SF on Sep 14, and it also ends in NYC around the same time.
• Sep 17: The US Government says no, so we march from OpenAI to Anthropic to City Hall, asking the Mayor to declare an AI Emergency. Six of us meet with Supervisor Bilal Mahmood that day.
• Nov 14 (planned): Coalitions will march in the US, Canada and France asking Trump and Xi to sign an AI Treaty at their Nov 18 meeting, to raise the public salience of a treaty. ^[1]

If you live in one of the cities listed on aitreatymarch.org, going to one of these protests would mean putting yourself out there, showing the world that you care, and our pictures will end up in the news all around the world.

But that’s only a step towards a longer-term vision of actually trying.

What’s the “actually trying” end game of Stop The AI Race

If we were actually trying, we would come back to being outside the AI Companies every day until they stop pursuing recursive self-improvement.

People would actually start doing more hunger strikes, sending more costly signals that feel like something you’d do if you thought there’s a substantial chance we don’t make it.

If we were actually trying, we would have people outside Anthropic’s office at 500 Howard St in SF every day until they stop frontier AI development, outside all of their entrances.

Stop The AI Race on July 20, outside the Anthropic Office

Today, employees of these companies go to their office every day, doing work which could potentially lead to human extinction, while their leadership is filing for a $1T IPO, all of that without receiving any serious pushback from the public.

In the meantime, it only takes 2-4 people to have banners outside of their two main entrances, which would remind every single employee of what they’re doing, and enable some of them (leadership included) to take actions that would help stop this race, which we believe was a key driver of success during the Google DeepMind Hunger Strike (some employees supported us through a thank you letter!), and we know had a lot of impact on OpenAI employees during Occupy OpenAI (from private conversations with employees).

Basically, the goal would be to be Anthropic’s conscience.

In fact, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, responding to Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas, wrote that given Anthropic’s incentives to stay commercially viable and at the research frontier, it is “enormously important that there be people outside those incentives—people who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics.”

So let’s take Chris Olah up on this, and let’s remind Anthropic employees of the extinction-level risks they’re imposing on all of us, by holding banners saying “Stop The AI Race” outside their office.

Email contact@stoptherace.ai, or send a message to mtrazzi.99 on Signal if you’d be interested in actually trying to reduce existential risk from AI. And if you have any friends in SF, NYC, DC, Boston, Chicago, Philly, Seattle, Paris, Marseille, Montréal, Toronto or Vancouver, ask them to sign up for a local protest on aitreatymarch.org, happening this Saturday.

1. ^{^}

   Note: in this post I don't address Scott Alexander 's SURA post or Nate's polarization post. For my answer to Nate, see this comment. I'll try to answer Scott in future posts I publish this month for https://justwrite.club/.