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The last few weeks have launched concerns about an AI extinction event into the mainstream. When Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from the company on Sept. 8, he wrote that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Tech CEOs such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk didn’t disagree. Instead, they called for frontier AI companies to slow the pace at which they improve model capabilities.

The spread of artificial intelligence has generated myriad other concerns, too: the ecological impact of data centers, privacy violations and surveillance, machine takeovers of creative endeavors. Fueled by these concerns, a broader pattern of emerging violence motivated by anti-AI sentiment is generating new grievances and forms of target selection that do not always neatly map onto familiar terrorist ideologies.

The last few weeks have launched concerns about an AI extinction event into the mainstream. When Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from the company on Sept. 8, he wrote that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Tech CEOs such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk didn’t disagree. Instead, they called for frontier AI companies to slow the pace at which they improve model capabilities.

The spread of artificial intelligence has generated myriad other concerns, too: the ecological impact of data centers, privacy violations and surveillance, machine takeovers of creative endeavors. Fueled by these concerns, a broader pattern of emerging violence motivated by anti-AI sentiment is generating new grievances and forms of target selection that do not always neatly map onto familiar terrorist ideologies.

On April 10, a 20-year-old man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home. Four days earlier, Indianapolis city councilman Ron Gibson, who had backed a data center rezoning measure in his district, awoke to find that 13 rounds had been fired into his home, accompanied by a note under his doormat reading “No Data Centers.”

These instances demonstrate a broader AI grievance that can motivate violence. Such grievance is amorphous and can be incorporated into the narratives of disparate extremist movements such as anarchism, environmentalism, or party radicalism, but it can also motivate individuals with little connection to an established movement. Targets are similarly diffuse and can include technology executives and researchers, local officials, and physical infrastructure. Rather than a shared ideological framework, a shared perception of AI as a source of harm connects instances of AI-motivated violence.

Yet while the underlying anxiety motivating such extremist behavior is felt globally, that behavior itself is not evenly distributed. This is because anxiety alone does not act as a conveyor belt toward violent action; rather, it can be either exacerbated or calmed by the political environment where it exists.

Despite shared anxieties, stark differences exist in perceptions of AI in the United States and China—the global superpowers driving the race for AI dominance. In a global Ipsos survey this year, 85 percent of Chinese respondents said AI offered more benefits than drawbacks, compared with 38 percent of........

© Foreign Policy