King Charles has been met with a protest ahead of his major artificial intelligence summit in Scotland, with campaigners taking their message to the sands of Prestwick beach.
A huge message reading “AI? Eh naw” was scrawled across the beach on Tuesday, translating roughly as “AI? Er, no”.
Positioned close to Prestwick Airport and directly beneath the flight path, the eye-catching display was designed to make its opposition impossible for arriving delegates to miss.
The protest comes as the King prepares to bring some of the biggest names in the technology world together at Dumfries House.
Executives from companies including Nvidia, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and OpenAI are expected to attend the gathering.
Lisa Beacham, 29, who coordinated the demonstration, described the scale of the proposed developments as “completely unprecedented for this country and for many countries in Europe”.
“King Charles has an absolutely fantastic reputation as an environmentalist,” she said, saying that campaigners hoped he would make clear to the technology leaders that they believe the developments could pose a serious environmental threat.
Another campaigner, 68-year-old Roz Lauchlin from West Kilbride, called for a moratorium on the proposals, saying developments were moving “far too fast”.
She said there was a need to establish “exactly what the implications of all this could really be for Scotland” before the plans move any further.
Charles is understood to want the meeting to provide a neutral setting where technology leaders and other voices can discuss the issue without the event becoming a platform for either side.
According to a source quoted by The Times, the King wants to explore whether a shared set of principles around AI could be useful.
2026-09-16 00:54:00
