A 69-year-old retired teacher from Berkeley, California, is believed to have become the first person jailed for protesting against artificial intelligence — and her message to the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta is blunt: "Regain your humanity."
Wynd Kaufmyn surrendered to authorities in San Francisco on Friday after a jury found her guilty for her role in a February 2025 action in which members of the group StopAI chained and locked the front doors of OpenAI's headquarters. She was convicted in June of interfering with a business, trespassing with intent to interfere with a business, unlawful assembly and refusal to disperse at a riot, and began serving a one-week sentence on Friday.
Supporters have dubbed her the "Rosa Parks of AI risk." David Kreuger, a University of Montreal AI safety expert, said: "As the first person to go to jail over this, Wynd Kaufmyn could go down in history as the Rosa Parks of AI risk."
Kaufmyn, who has a long history of activism, said she went to prison to "sound the alarm" and called the pursuit of artificial superintelligence by profit-driven companies "unconscionable and reprehensible." Her message: "Stop the progress of this technology. Let's get a global ban on the race to superintelligence."
Stuart Russell, the prominent Berkeley AI professor, testified in her defence, arguing that OpenAI had "deployed AI systems with inadequate safeguards" and that further development "must be conditioned on rigorous guarantees of safety, which are currently unavailable."
The case lands amid intensifying alarm about frontier AI: this week, US Senator Bernie Sanders demanded that tech leaders pause AI development, warning of potential bioweapons risks, while more than a thousand researchers at frontier labs signed a letter warning that capability development could "rapidly accelerate beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems."
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said the verdict sent "a resounding message rejecting the notion that protesters can endanger public safety as a means to an end." OpenAI was approached for comment.
