The retired teacher from Berkeley, California<\/a>, refused to move from a sit-in protest in February 2025 and pleaded not guilty to multiple misdemeanor charges. She was convicted in June of interfering with a business, trespassing with intent to interfere with a business, unlawful assembly and refusal to disburse a riot. On Friday, sheriff\u2019s officers handcuffed her as fellow campaigners sang to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic (Glory, Glory Hallelujah): \u201cRise up, rise up and join us\/Do not let the tech bros destroy us.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s absolutely frightening and appalling that these CEOs and AI experts know the dangers and they are pursuing it anyway,\u201d Kaufmyn said before she was imprisoned. \u201cThat to me is unconscionable and reprehensible.\u201d<\/p>\n She said she was willing to go to jail not because she was a martyr but because it was an \u201cissue of sounding the alarm, challenging the system and hopefully trying to get the message out\u201d.<\/p>\n Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney, said the guilty verdict sent \u201ca resounding message rejecting the notion that protesters can endanger public safety as a means to an end\u201d.<\/p>\n A protest against AI outside OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco, California, on 11 July. Photograph: Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/p>\n As Kaufmyn was led out from the court, her supporters called out: \u201cStop AI\u201d and: \u201cFree Wynd\u201d as the sheriff\u2019s officer yelled: \u201cClear the court\u201d and the judge admonished the protesters.<\/p>\n Dwight Ost, 73, one of two dozen other StopAI activists at the courthouse, called Kaufmyn \u201ca brave and courageous woman\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an existential threat that I believe in,\u201d he said. \u201cThey can\u2019t control it, and even the so-called experts don\u2019t know what it\u2019s about.\u201d<\/p>\n Kaufmyn had argued that the protest was a necessity and that she believed she was allowed to act to prevent a greater harm from happening. Since the lobby sit-in last year, some of the biggest AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have reported<\/a> their models escaping<\/a> the confinements of experiments.<\/p>\n This week, the US senator Bernie Sanders demanded<\/a> tech leaders pause AI development, citing fears that, in the wrong hands, it might \u201clead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people\u201d.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, more than a thousand researchers at frontier AI labs this summer signed a letter warning of \u201ca real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems\u201d.<\/p>\n Frontier AI labs are locked in a race to create more capable AI models as the companies target IPOs that are forecast to reach valuations in the trillions of dollars. At the same time, Washington is competing with Beijing for supremacy in the fast-developing technology, creating a disincentive for tougher safety regulation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe jury rejected [Kayfmyn\u2019s] necessity defence, but as the first person to go to jail over this, Wynd Kaufmyn could go down in history as the Rosa Parks of AI risk,\u201d said David Kreuger, a University of Montreal AI safety expert who has warned<\/a> AI \u201cmay literally lead to human extinction, in the same way that humans have caused many other species to go extinct\u201d. Parks was a Black woman who refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger in contravention of racist segregation laws in 1950s Alabama, a catalyzing incident for the US civil rights movement of the ensuing decade.<\/p>\n
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