Guido Reichstadter, who climbed up the Frederick Memorial Douglass Bridge to protest the Iran war, is still up there as of Saturday morning.
Mr. Reichstadter posted a picture of the sunrise from an arch on the bridge and once again called for the end of the Iran war and for people to “stop AI.”
Good morning!
End the war
Stop AI pic.twitter.com/n9G1bwNsNf
— Guido Reichstadter (@wolflovesmelon) May 2, 2026
The protester remained on the bridge as of 9:17 a.m., per a post from the Metropolitan Police Department on X. The police are referring to the incident as a “barricade situation” and say they are trying to negotiate with Mr. Reichstadter to get him to come down.
Mr. Reichstadter first climbed the bridge Friday afternoon before unfurling a long, black ribbon-like cloth.
SEE ALSO: High-wire protest: Man scales Washington bridge arch with black ribbon to oppose Iran war
Roughly 90 minutes after getting up onto the arch, he posted on X that he was “calling on the people of the United States to bring an immediate end to the Trump regime’s illegal war on Iran and the removal of the regime power through mass nonviolent direct action and non-cooperation.”
Mr. Reichstadter also wrote that he wants to “urgently warn the people of the US and the world of the imminent danger we are in of crossing a point of no return towards the development of artificial intelligence which poses the risk of catastrophic harm to humanity, including human extinction.”
He called on the governments of the world to take action to ban “artificial general intelligence and machine super intelligence.”
The police temporarily closed South Capitol Street SE going across the bridge, but reopened the three outbound lanes and one of the inbound lanes later on Friday evening.
This incident is not the first time Mr. Reichstadter has chosen to protest something by climbing the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge. In 2022, he went up there and set off a green smoke bomb in support of abortion rights after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
