Against Thalès, against Cyberweek, against the complicity of the University of Rennes: blockades and actions.

🔴 We are reposting the press release and photos of AGIR's actions from their page (Anti-industrial Assembly Rennes) made this Thursday at Rennes Against the Cyberweek ! A criticism complementary to the one we expressed on Wednesday during our disruption of the Thalès conference (see last article on antitechresistance.org).

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AGAINST THALES, AGAINST CYBERWEEK, AGAINST THE COMPLICITY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF RENNES: BLOCKING AND ACTIONS THIS THURSDAY

Last September, we voted at the Anti-Industrial General Assembly in Rennes (AGIR) to thwart “AI week” by disrupting the planned conferences. In particular, the DGA (Directorate General of the Armed Forces) sold its “SequoIA” project to students from the University of Rennes, without allowing them to form a critical opinion on the issue of AI. The SequoIA project is 20 million euros offered to manufacturers (Thales, Airbus, Orange...) and to the army to develop AI in defense and surveillance.

But we didn't want to stop there.

On Thursday, November 21, when yesterday the Anti-Tech Resistance collective launched a call to resist Cyberweek by disrupting a Thales conference, we, students, young and old mobilized within AGIR, decided not to let our university campuses passively ignore this event.

While artificial intelligence and French technologies, the fruit of Thales's innovations, are currently used to massacre and suppress populations all over the world, primarily in Palestine, but also in Egypt or Lebanon, we refuse to condone this state of affairs by our silence.

This is why this morning at 7 am our classmates from the University of Rennes 2 gathered to symbolically block building L in order to inform the students of the monstrous promotion of military AIs currently underway at the Couvent des Jacobins, and to invite them to a public meeting against Cyberweek on campus at 10:00am.

In parallel with this action, our comrades from Beaulieu organized themselves to put their finger on Thales's accomplices within the University of Rennes 1: the technocrats from the IRISA and INRIA laboratories, responsible for the “SequoIA” military AI project, in partnership with Thales in particular.

After the blockade in Rennes 2, an INRIA occupation in Beaulieu therefore took place this noon to spill fake blood, symbolic of the past and future victims of autonomous weapons and military AIs. Technologies made possible by the research of soulless scientists like those in these labs, and the collaboration of industrial empires like Thales.

In a context where the French State announces that it wants to invest 2 billion in a military AI center near Rennes (AMIAD), we refuse that the university be a place of complicity in such practices. A clear position must be taken against the development of AI in general, and against the presence of Thales in Rennes and at Cyberweek in particular.

In defense of life on Earth, human freedom and peace between peoples, we call on all students to mobilize alongside us for future actions against the construction of a military AI hub in Rennes. We will not let these sociopaths continue their arms race without doing anything, the resistance has only just begun!

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