The AI safety protest reached OpenAI's developer conference with a new demand: do something about the layoffs

A few dozen protesters rallied outside OpenAI's DevDay conference at Fort Mason in San Francisco on 29 September 2026, and for the first time in this month's run of demonstrations the list of demands included AI-driven job losses alongside military and immigration contracts. Reuters reported the three headline demands: cut the Pentagon contract, stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement using OpenAI technology to screen recruits, and sign a democracy pledge. The organisers were not the usual existential-risk groups. Bay Resistance led, with roughly fifteen backers that included the Service Employees International Union, the San Francisco Labor Council and the Tech Workers Coalition, and the chant was people over profit. One protester told PCMag he had recently been laid off at Chime, the San Francisco fintech, and that the company's adoption of AI played a role; Chime cut about 150 people, a tenth of its staff, in July, in a memo that said AI is changing what is possible but requires new skills. Twelve days earlier a different crowd had marched from OpenAI to Anthropic under the banner Stop the AI Race, carrying signs reading extinction is on the table and asking the companies' employees to quit. That march followed the 8 September resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, whose post saying the labs were gambling with our lives was viewed more than 70 million times. The two protests wanted different things from the same building. The safety marchers want the technology slowed for everyone's sake; the labour coalition wants the people already losing work to it counted and compensated. OpenAI did not respond to either. No employer action and no job figure is recorded here; the story is that the labour movement has now joined the picket line that the safety movement started.