Molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman's home; second incident days later

Police said a 20-year-old man threw a Molotov cocktail at the exterior gate of Sam Altman’s San Francisco home at around 4 a.m. on 10 April, starting a fire before fleeing on foot. Less than an hour later, authorities said, he travelled roughly three miles to OpenAI’s headquarters and threatened to burn the building down. No one was injured in either incident.

The suspect, Daniel Moreno-Gama, had travelled from Spring, Texas. He was charged in California state court with two counts of attempted murder and attempted arson, and separately by federal prosecutors with possession of an unregistered firearm and destruction of property by explosives — charges carrying combined maximum penalties well beyond a decade. Police said he was carrying a document warning of AI’s risk to humanity that listed other AI company executives, board members and investors as potential targets. Reporting found he had posted around 34 messages over roughly a year and a half in the Discord server of PauseAI, an advocacy group calling for a moratorium on frontier AI development; none of the messages contained explicit calls to violence, though one was later flagged as ambiguous, and Discord banned him for behaviour occurring off its platform. His attorney said he had been in the midst of a mental health crisis.

Two days later, in a separate incident, two people were arrested after gunfire was reported near the same house in the early hours of Sunday morning; police said a car stopped outside the residence before a shot was fired from inside it. OpenAI said the second incident was unrelated to the Molotov cocktail attack.

The attack was among the first cases of serious physical violence in the United States explicitly tied to AI-risk discourse, and drew attention to the question of how rhetoric warning of AI’s existential danger — used by researchers, campaigners and some AI executives themselves — could be read by an unstable individual as a call to violent action against the industry’s own leaders.