From Molotov cocktails to data center shutdowns, the AI backlash is turning revolutionary

For years, the resistance to artificial intelligence looked manageable. There were academics writing open letters, Hollywood writers striking over contract language, the think-tank reports warning of job displacement. Tech executives nodded, pledged responsibility, and kept building as fast as they could.

Then someone threw a firebomb at Sam Altman’s house.

On Friday, a 20-year-old man named Daniel Moreno-Gama traveled from Spring, Texas, to San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood and allegedly hurled an incendiary device at the gate of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s $27 million home, igniting a fire at the exterior gate. No one was injured, but Moreno-Gama was arrested approximately an hour later outside OpenAI’s headquarters—where he was allegedly trying to shatter the building’s glass doors with a chair and threatening to burn the facility to the ground. He is now facing state charges of attempted murder and federal charges that could include domestic terrorism.

Authorities afterward found a manifesto warning of humanity’s “extinction” at the hands of AI and expressing an urge to commit murder, and a disturbing personal Substack. The next morning, Altman posted a plea for sanity on his X account, attaching a photo of his husband and young child. “Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our house, no matter what they think about me,” Altman wrote.To no avail. Early Sunday morning, two more Gen Zers, one 23 and the other 25, were arrested after shooting a gun near the Russian Hill home of Sam Altman (it is unclear at this time if the shooting was targeted).

After the attacks, pundits and professional opinion-havers pointed fingers in every direction: at the Stop AI crowd, a radical group that has staged protests and flash subpoena-deliveries to try to halt the pace of artificial intelligence altogether; at the news media, which has critically covered Altman and his peers; and at Altman himself, for stoking fear about AI displacement with his sometimes apocalyptic rhetoric. Among the older........

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