Student-led protesters clash with riot police in France - CBC

Protesters at an anti-AI data centre rally in downtown Halifax on Oct. 17, 2026. Credit: Suzanne Rent Rally organized for the day after EverWind announces a $10 billion AI data centre in Point Tupper.

Students and other protesters gathered outside the Ministry of Education in Tirana on Saturday as anti-government demonstrations entered their fifth consecutive day. The protests, which have spread to cities across Albania, intensified after high school and university students joined a broader movement calling for Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama's resignation over allegations of corruption.

In a bar below Waterloo Bridge, a cell of a fast-growing anti-AI protest movement met last week to plot their latest move: disrupting a tech industry dinner being addressed by a senior executive from the chip maker Nvidia. Emma, a 28-year-old bartender, had never before taken direct action and was the most nervous of the four plotters from Pull The Plug, one of a growing number of AI-focused campaign groups around the world. Around the table were a former climate protester and a campaigner versed in the anti-nuclear movement. Emma signed up after a summer of feeling rising alarm at the catastrophic risks of AI, first when a swarm of OpenAI agents escaped their training “sandbox”, cheated, deceived and conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website and then as Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, quit with an apocalyptic warning that superintelligent AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. As darkness fell they crossed the Thames to the Claremont hotel where Emma filmed while two others unfurled a banner in a function room, shouting “Pull the plug on Nvidia” and “Pull the plug on Palantir”.