Maxime Fournes

French AI safety activist and the current CEO of PauseAI Global, the international grassroots movement calling for a pause on frontier AI development. Maxime Fournes (sometimes misspelled "Fourness") is a French AI safety activist and the current CEO of PauseAI Global, the international grassroots movement calling for a pause on frontier AI development.  Fournes was appointed CEO of PauseAI Global in December 2025, after having built Pause IA France into a prominent national movement — its protests were covered in roughly 30 French news articles, and his podcast appearances have surpassed 100,000 views.

Fournes has over 10 years of experience as a deep learning and machine learning engineer. He previously led an R&D team at Two Sigma, one of the world's top quantitative investment funds, where he worked on cutting-edge NLP and document understanding models. He holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and Centrale Lyon in mathematics and quantitative finance.