Someone lobbed a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s place, and another fired a gun at his house.
A suspect was later arrested at OpenAI headquarters after allegedly threatening to burn the building down, according to the San Francisco police department. A 27-year-old anti-AI activist, Sam Kirchner, prompted the lockdown of OpenAI’s San Francisco offices. Kirchner, who has been missing since November 21, was in the midst of a mental health crisis when he threatened to go to the company’s offices to “murder people.”
Then, on early Sunday morning, a car stopped and appeared to have fired a gun at Altman’s Russian Hill home.
The San Francisco Police Department announced the arrest of two suspects, Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, who were booked for negligent discharge.
The person in the passenger seat put their hand out the window and appeared to fire a round on the Lombard side of the property, according to a police report on the incident, which cited surveillance footage and the compound’s security personnel, who reported hearing a gunshot. The car then fled, and a camera captured its license plate, which later led police to seize the vehicle, according to the report. A search of the residence by officers turned up three firearms, according to police.
Altman linked the drama to a recent New Yorker profile, calling it “an incendiary article”.
Altman said, “I brushed it aside. Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.”
The piece was written by New Yorker writers Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, with Farrow known for Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting tied to the Harvey Weinstein allegations. Farrow and Marantz said interviews with more than 100 people painted Altman as someone with “a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart.”
They reported that sources questioned his trustworthiness, including one anonymous board member who claimed he mixes “a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction with a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”
Altman said he can spot “a lot of things I’m proud of and a bunch of mistakes.”
He said his tendency towards being conflict-averse has caused great pain for him and OpenAI.
Altman dragged up the 2023 boardroom fiasco, writing: “I am not proud of handling myself badly in a conflict with our previous board that led to a huge mess for the company.”
“I have made many other mistakes throughout the insane trajectory of OpenAI; I am a flawed person in the centre of an exceptionally complex situation, trying to get a little better each year, always working for the mission.”
He went on: “I am sorry to the people I’ve hurt and wish I had learned faster.”
He then complained there is “so much Shakespearean drama between the companies in our field”, blaming a “‘ring of power’ dynamic” that “makes people do crazy things.”
Altman tried to redirect the obsession with artificial general intelligence, writing: “I don’t mean that [artificial general intelligence] is the ring itself, but instead the totalising philosophy of ‘being the one to control AGI.’” His fix was “to orient towards sharing the technology with people broadly, and for no one to have the ring.”
Altman said he welcomes “good-faith criticism and debate” and insisted “technological progress can make the future unbelievably good, for your family and mine.” He closed with, “While we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally,” he said.
