There are, I believe, objective difficulties to committing to "actually trying" as described in this post.
1. There does not exist a known discrete course of action that has a lower-bounded chance of success. Even for a financially independent, high profile individual, making a sustained personal effort to effectuate the highest negative delta P(doom) is an incredibly difficult proposition. So to outperform a courageous throwing a dart into the dark, one must first go through the task of formulating an actionable plan with realistic objectives. This is a SHARED cost for all those potentially willing to "actually try". So perhaps MORE work should be done regarding this barrier to action.
2. The individual calculus of jumping into action is expensive, and the theoretical P(doom) of inaction is not guaranteed to be 100%. The distinction is subtle but real: why would I make a tremendous personal sacrifice to make X happen, when X might happen anyway regardless of what I do, when I can instead focusing on optimizing my situation conditional on X happening? ~X being total loss alone doesn't change the calculus. I am not sure what can be done with this problem, as it is simply the current game state we find ourselves in.
3. Money, money, and adversity. Bringing about sweeping changes in some aspect of society, almost by definition, is politics. So AI slowdown will be as hard as other major political problems. Past examples tells us that there needs to be sustained organization, funding, and personal sacrifices. Treating it as a political goal is also, as I believe, the most promising framework for item 1 listed above, but doesn't make it any easier in practice. Good news is that this is a concrete, solvable problem. We don't know for certain if alignment can be solved or automated safety research will work, but we do know that a coordinated total stop will be guaranteed to prevent P(doom). So we have a strategy, we have a rough idea of how hard it is, but this is THE industry of our time. Trillions of dollars have already been committed. The entire financial market hinges on the promised productivity gain. A total stop will amount to immense economic pain, so stopping is not free. I currently do not see enough political funding interests to make any dent. Absent funding, political movements often result from adversity. Unsafe, unhealthy, unfair practices can rally people against an adverse condition. So far this "adversity" narrative is primarily restricted to the data center/local community conflict, and I am not seeing a pathway for it to escalate. So in summary, the macro environment for "actually trying" politically needs improvement.
Overall, I share your sentiment. I applaud those who took actions.
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:
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:
My own version goes:
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:
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 “Google 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:
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:
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. Stop The AI Race is also hiring.
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/.