A note from our founder

I spent 15 years working on climate change. Today I'm writing to you with a new mission.

I was in my twenties when I helped start 350.org. At the time, the smartest people in Washington told us climate change was a niche issue normal people didn't care about. Fossil fuels were the economy. The politics were impossible. The best we could hope for was to pass small, incremental policies, adapt gracefully to a warming world, and stop making so much noise about it.

They were wrong — but not because we out-argued them with better charts and white papers. The fossil fuel industry had bought influence, politicians, and power with their unlimited profits, and we learned we had to out-organize them. People showed up: along pipeline routes, at city council meetings, at their own banks and universities and state capitols, and by the millions in the streets — until the politicians who had been ignoring us decided that ignoring us cost more than listening.

I'm telling you this because I see echoes of the same story in the fight to rein in AI.

Experts tell us this is the least powerful AI systems will ever be — and they're already breaking containment to pursue goals we don't understand. They're already displacing workers and slowing hiring across the economy. They're already worsening inequality, driving up emissions and utility bills, fueling mental health crises, and even taking the lives of our children.

One of the most infuriating investigative reports I came across working on climate change was about Exxon's own research. Their scientists knew fossil fuels were warming the planet by at least 1977 — decades before almost anyone else. They considered warning the rest of us, and decided not to, so the profits could keep coming.

Now look at what today's AI CEOs are saying. Sam Altman has said “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.” Elon Musk agrees with the sentiment. They know better than anyone what they're building. The idea is to replace human beings with machines wherever possible, and amass unimaginable wealth and power in the process — no matter what it costs the rest of us.

Lately, though, these same CEOs are singing a different tune. They're painting a rosy future of abundance: fully automated, endlessly healthy lives of leisure. It reminds me of the social media pitch. The last generation of tech titans sold Facebook and Twitter as utopias of connection — then quietly defanged government's ability to regulate them, built machines designed to extract ungodly profits from our attention and our data, and left us more isolated, divided, and lonely than ever.

We can't let that happen with AI. The stakes are too high. The rosy pitch is what it is: the same playbook we've seen generation after generation — privatize the profits for wealthy CEOs and investors, and let the rest of us bear the cost. This time, the most obscene cost imaginable.

Right now, some of the most important decisions on Earth are being made in a handful of rooms in northern California, by people who will never meet our kids — people who have said out loud, in interviews and in their own safety reports, that they are building something that could go catastrophically wrong, and that they intend to keep building it anyway because the money is too good to stop.

They get to make those choices because nobody is holding them accountable. For a decade, Washington — on a bipartisan basis — has let these companies build whatever they want, however dangerous or disruptive, with no guardrails.

That's the part we can change. Not the technology. The power.

So we're coming together to say: the era of doing nothing on AI is over.

We are Irreplaceable, and we have demands. An economy that works for everyone, not just Big AI and its executives. Our essential freedoms defended against systems built to strip them away. And a hard line against building machines that put all of us at existential risk.

I'm asking you to show up — in person, with your neighbors, in the rooms where decisions get made. The AI industry's greatest asset right now is that our anger lives in comment sections and whispered conversations at the water cooler, where it can be safely ignored. But two hundred people at a county board meeting is a constituency. Thousands at a state capitol is a force. Millions in the streets is a movement — and every politician in America knows the difference.

When we show up together, the thing I've watched work before starts working again. A movement gets big enough, loud enough, and local enough that the people in charge start doing math. There's nothing mystical about that moment. It's arithmetic, and we can do the arithmetic.

Fifteen years ago I was told the climate fight wasn't worth fighting — that the fossil fuel companies were too powerful, that we'd already lost. Instead we organized, built power, and made ourselves unignorable until federal legislation passed. We didn't win everything. But we broke the story that nothing could be done, and everything accomplished since has run through that crack.

The odds are tough. We're up against some of the most powerful oligarchs in the history of this country. But this is not a hopeless fight. We are irreplaceable, and I'm grateful to be in it with you.

Add your name and let's get to work.