Irreplaceable formally launched on Aug. 28 and is aiming its campaign at tech companies and the government, using the climate movement's playbook to organize opposition to AI, according to The Atlantic. The new group is staffed with people who made their names in the climate movement, and it wants to channel anger at a technology being pushed by executives, engineers and the state apparatus that keeps the race moving.
Three-quarters of Americans oppose a data center being built in their area. Three-quarters think AI will hurt their job security. Nearly 70 percent think the technology is advancing too quickly. Those numbers sit underneath a simple fact: people are being asked to live with the costs while decisions get made somewhere else, by people with titles, budgets and access.
Who Gets the Squeeze
Jeremy Ornstein, a campaign strategist for Irreplaceable and former organizer with the Sunrise Movement, said, "People get it." He added, "People have the intuition that if we create machines more powerful than people, that could go dangerously and terribly wrong." That’s the kind of plainspoken alarm that tends to spread faster than any white paper ever could, especially when the people most exposed to the fallout have little say in the machinery being built around them.
Phil Aroneanu, Irreplaceable's executive director and a co-founder of the climate organization 350.org, said climate advocates initially floundered because they acted as policy wonks. He said movements are built not necessarily on what people think, but instead on what they feel. "People are already feeling the squeeze," Aroneanu said. "And we should be pointing that anxiety and that anger in the right direction."
Irreplaceable says it will prioritize mitigating automation's effects on the economy, protecting against government and corporate use of AI to surveil Americans, and establishing industry oversight and guardrails to prevent catastrophic disasters, such as widespread blackouts caused by AI-powered hacking or bot-engineered pandemics. The group has ties to both the Bay Area and Washington, and it wants the AI race to slow down and the technology to be overseen not by executives and engineers, but by the broadest population possible.
What People Are Already Doing
Hundreds of people gathered in July for what was likely the largest anti-AI demonstration in San Francisco's history, marching from OpenAI's headquarters to Anthropic's and finally to Google's. Some of the same "Stop the AI Race" organizers had staged a somewhat disorganized protest a few months earlier, and the second march was advised by Ornstein and included chant sheets, a marching band and a slushy truck to "freeze" AI. That’s direct action with a sense of humor, and it came from people outside the boardroom, not from the people profiting off the race.
Climate-oriented groups including the environmental-justice arm of the NAACP, the Sierra Club and Earthjustice are supporting local data-center battles by filing lawsuits, shaping model legislation and organizing protests. Dozens of data centers have been canceled in the face of local opposition, and all of the major AI companies have promised to pay extra to avoid hiking up local electricity bills. The companies can promise, of course. The people living near the projects still have to fight for every inch.
In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed and William Lawrence, who is a co-founder of Sunrise, won Democratic primaries as progressive candidates hammering against data centers. The Atlantic said progressive and Republican candidates alike are bashing the tech industry to win primary elections, while states and cities are halting plans for data-center development. The electoral route is there, but it’s still a route through the same narrow gatekeepers, with the same corporate pressure waiting on the other side.
The Limits of the Race
The Atlantic said the AI backlash is far from a sweeping tide because people may dislike data centers but still enjoy AI products, fear bots getting too powerful too quickly but also think America needs to stay ahead of China in AI development. It said the backlash is to some extent an American phenomenon and that the technology generally polls much better outside the U.S., which bodes poorly for global norms or treaties. So the system keeps selling speed, fear and competition at the same time, and calls that progress.
When pressed, nobody from Irreplaceable and no other climate activists turning to AI would articulate a concrete AI agenda. William Lawrence said, "We've aligned around saying no. Now, there is an important conversation that is yet to come, about—okay, so what do we want?" Irreplaceable's stated plan is to build a coalition this year, develop a unified policy next year and implement that agenda by the end of 2029. That’s a long timetable for people already living with the squeeze.
Aroneanu said, "You have to show the benefits to people immediately. It's gotta land in their pocketbooks almost immediately for it to have political salience. And then you have to keep defending it." He also said the movement must be polarized not left-right, but "down-up." Caroline Behringer, a communications strategist who worked on President Obama's Climate Action Plan and now runs Athena Insights, a polling organization that studies attitudes toward AI, said people don't like that "this technology is coming into their lives and they have very little control over it."
Aroneanu said political parties are really exceptionally good at generating negative partisanship, and that industry is likely to split the base. He said he does not see conservative counterparts as his explicit remit, though Irreplaceable hopes they will emerge and believes its populist message will cross culture-war lines. Major figures at both OpenAI and Anthropic have suggested that a true AI revolution could require new democratic and economic institutions. For now, the people most affected are still being told to wait while executives, engineers and officials decide what kind of future gets built over their heads.