Compiled 10 September 2026 from the LessWrong post and comments, Zvi’s AI #185, and linked primary sources.

Part 1 — Facts

1. Background

• PauseAI Global (CEO Maxime Fournes, since Feb 2026; previously ran PauseAI France) and PauseAI US (founder/ED Holly Elmore, who also presides over its board) are separate legal entities sharing a brand.
• Global historically listed PauseAI US on its communities map, told US donors to give to PauseAI US, and redirected US newcomers there. PauseAI US did not reciprocate.
• Fournes’s June 2026 LW post on movement-building already carried a disclaimer that PauseAI ≠ PauseAI US.

2. Relationship sours

Grievances Global cites in the letter:

• Elmore’s sustained personal attacks on individuals, public and private.
• Allies telling Global they cannot associate with the brand because of those attacks.
• Elmore “weaponising” confidential feedback Global shared privately.
• Elmore acquiring pauseai.com and redirecting it to the PauseAI US site.
• Elmore having, by her own acknowledgment (per the letter),“durably blocked” Global’s access to essential funding.
• Habryka fills in the funding piece: SFF blocked all advocacy funding under a “calls for violence” definition broad enough to include jokes by fictional characters, substantially because of PauseAI US.

3. Last step

Fournes asks for a leadership change at PauseAI US. Elmore refuses. He forwards her response to national leads; the overwhelming majority still support disendorsement.

4. The letter (1 September 2026)

Full text. Key moves:

• Global “officially disendorses PauseAI US’ current leadership.”
• Stops prioritising coordination; will make clear the orgs are separate.
• Opens direct membership to US-based people; announces“PauseAI North America” (Canada/US/Mexico).
• Stated principle: condemn actions, never character;“attacking people’s character is not aligned with our fundamental commitment to nonviolence.”
• Strategic disagreement: Global wants to win over the safety community; Elmore alienates it.
• Pre-empts “petty infighting”; predicts Elmore will respond with accusations Fournes considers baseless.

5. The post

Posted to LessWrong by nem, 1 Sept, framed as confusion for volunteers. ~276 karma, ~209 comments at time of writing.

Part 2 — Opinions, organised by the question in dispute

Q1. Was the split right?

• Yes — Ben Pace: positive update about Global’s health; Elmore can’t keep allies. (His example, a Liron Shapira falling-out, was corrected in-thread: one month in 2023, since resolved; Pace says there are other examples.)
• Yes — Eliezer Yudkowsky: not petty; Global has legit reasons. Later clarified: he’d be frantic to sever ties and would probably rename; not a paragraph-wise endorsement.
• Locally valid regardless — J Bostock: a “nonviolence plus” comms rule (don’t post things that look like veiled violence) is a defensible org policy; disendorsing a pattern of violating it is valid whatever the policy’s net value.

Nobody in the thread argues the split itself was wrong. The dispute is over the reasoning and over Elmore.

Q2. Is Global’s stated principle sound? (“Attack actions, never character; character attacks violate nonviolence.”)

No, and it’s discrediting:

• Richard Ngo: characterising character critique as violence is absurd; character evaluation is a foundational coordination mechanism. This is the conflict-avoidance that let labs capture safety (his earlier post), now repeated against the safety community.
• Ben Pace: you cannot negotiate with Altman without judging whether he keeps agreements.
• habryka: major downward update on Global; “conspiracy attractor,” probably worse than the “mindkilled soldier”attractor. Also confused by “bringing the labs to the table.”
• Zvi: disendorses the sentence as too general; the right amount of character criticism is neither zero nor “11 on everyone who associates with a lab.”

Partial defence:

• Eli Tyre: individuals may judge character; orgs should stick to verifiable observations, because org statements become party lines.
• Kaj Sotala: the real objection is “the whole thing Elmore does,” unstatable without looking petty, so it gets dressed as an abstract principle.
• Matt Vincent: Elmore herself says her attacks represent the org (“the founder is the startup,” in On Callouts).
• Causal story: habryka — SFF’s funding cut made Global paranoid about upsetting funders and their allies.

Q3. Is Elmore’s public moral condemnation of capabilities people good?

Yes / defensible:

• Liron Shapira (top comment, 153 karma): her judgments follow a valid syllogism — pushing capabilities under high x-risk → morally bad actions → morally bad actor. She is uniquely moving the Overton window on the “missing mood.” Concedes she sometimes judges on subjective rather than reasoned grounds (Doom Debates episode).
• TsviBT: the syllogism needs “they know”; self-deception is the crux; the real horror is that no “debate or update” norm exists.
• JennaS: public outrage will exceed hers anyway; update now.
• zeiffel: elite workers are susceptible to 1-on-1 social pressure; it has worked on friends.
• MichaelDickens: radical flank effect.
• Zvi: not his view, but a valid one; some of Elmore’s attacks on him were honourable and correct given her views, others weren’t.

No / unproven:

• Erich Grunewald: no evidence the abrasive style moves windows; didn’t work in animal advocacy. Also: radical-flank requires empowering moderates, and she attacks moderates.
• Chris Leong: right idea, wrong messenger; stop using Holly as a crutch.
• Ngo (edit to his comment): the Seb Krier “memes as calls for violence” episode was “fairly unhinged”; less sympathetic than his original framing.
• Ben Pace: indiscriminate condemnation muddies the waters, adds cruelty, lowers discourse standards; the banality of evil means nice people commit atrocities.
• Carringtone Kinyanjui: second-order effects — tribal walls, radicalised activists, war zones vs trading zones.
• One accusation collapsed: Trinley Goldenberg claimed Elmore mocked Beff Jezos’s weight; Joern Stoehler found the tweet; it was a different account. Retracted.
• Proposed fix: Ebenezer Dukakis — a funder brokers Elmore ceding the “PauseAI US” brand and spinning out a polemical org; good cop / bad cop.

Q4. Are “Nuremberg trials for AI employees” a call for violence?

Trigger: Elmore’s tweet and her Substack post Holly’s Basilisk (“The Berkeley trials, perhaps”).

Yes-ish:

• J Bostock: indirect state violence; kills beneficial trade with lab safety researchers.
• Shankar Sivarajan: “trial” framing doesn’t launder it (witch trial by ordeal analogy).
• Arjun Panickssery: Nuremberg connotes an extraordinary tribunal executing defeated enemies under retroactive law.

No:

• habryka: supports such trials and wants convictions; calling for criminal trials is the civilised alternative to violence.
• Linch: not violence, but bad strategy — don’t put opponents on death ground; amnesty for pre-Sept-2026 activity is net good.
• Ben Pace, Zvi, Rob Bensinger: calling for fair trials is what law and government mean.

Ex post facto sub-dispute:

• 1a3orn, aphyer, FeepingCreature: no retroactive law is foundational; it’s in the Constitution.
• Connor Williams: Nuremberg and Lincoln’s habeas suspension were both partly extra-legal and both widely judged necessary.
• habryka’s settled position (here, here, Twitter): no new retroactive law; prosecute under existing reckless-endangerment / fraud / public-nuisance doctrine; US courts decide. All Nuremberg law was invented because no framework existed — a different situation from a functioning legal system.
• Harry Esau and dbohdan: Elmore’s own post explicitly rejects nullum crimen sine lege, so she and habryka mean different things by “Nuremberg.”
• 307th: the anti-lab camp never entertains that its own actions could be net harmful. habryka: two-digit extinction probabilities are Holocaust-scale by the labs’ own lights.

Fallout:

• Nate Showell left LessWrong over habryka’s comment.
• Thread spilled to Twitter: Joshua Achiam quote-tweeted habryka; Elmore re-upped her “Berkeley trials” post.

Part 3 — Context outside the thread

• Zvi, AI #185 (10 Sept). Understands the decision; disendorses the nonviolence sentence; notes both sides have“gone too far.”
• Prior history. Elmore expelled Sam Kirchner and Guido Reichstadter from PauseAI US in 2024 over illegal direct action; they founded StopAI (Fortune, Ban the Bots explainer). April 2026: the Altman firebombing suspect turned up in PauseAI’s Discord, putting both orgs under press scrutiny.
• Elmore’s documented targets (per thread links): Zvi, theMETR/Redwood HuggingFace investigators, Seb Krier, lab safety staff.
• Elmore’s own strategy writing: On Callouts, Holly’s Basilisk.

Part 4 — Not found

• No public reply from Elmore to the letter, on LessWrong or elsewhere located.
• The specific counter-accusations Fournes says she has made against Global.
• Only Global’s account exists of the domain redirect, the leaked feedback, and the funding block.