PauseAI largely seek to emulate existing social movements (like the climate justice movement) but essentially has a cargo cult approach to how social movements work. For a start, there is currently no scientific consensus around AI safety the way there is around climate change, so all actions trying to imitate the climate justice movement are extremely premature. Blockading an AI company's office talking about existential risk from artificial general intelligence won't convince any standby passenger, it will just make you look like a doomsayer caricature. It would be comparable to staging an Extinction Rebellion protest in the mid-19th-century.

Due to this, many in PauseAI are trying to do coalition politics bringing together all opponents of work on AI (neo-Luddites, SJ-oriented AI ethicists, environmentalists, intellectual property lobbyists). But the space of possible AI policies is highly dimensional, so any such coalition, done with little understanding of political strategy, will risk focusing on policies and AI systems that have little to do with existential risk (such as image generators), or that even might prove entirely counter-productive (by entrenching further centralization in the hands of the Big Four¹ and discouraging independent research by EA-aligned groups like EleutherAI).

¹: Microsoft/OpenAI, Amazon/Anthropic, Google/DeepMind, Facebook/Meta