The 20-year-old Texas man arrested in February in connection with the alleged arson plot carried an anti-AI manifesto alongside a lighter and a jug of kerosene, according to authorities. The case is one of a spate of attacks this year that has drawn the attention of extremism researchers, the tech industry and federal law enforcement, The Guardian reported Sunday.
In April, Italian authorities arrested a “nature pilled” Instagram influencer in Rome who they said was plotting a series of anti-tech attacks inspired by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Two self-described “ecofascists” who carried out a deadly anti-Muslim attack on a mosque in San Diego last month cited “AI slop” and Vice President JD Vance’s ties to Palantir as motivations in their manifesto, according to the Guardian report.
An Indianapolis city councilor woke up earlier this year to gunshots fired into his home, finding a note reading “NO DATA CENTERS,” The Guardian reported.
“AI is becoming this driver of political violence, and that’s a very new phenomenon,” said Jordyn Abrams, a researcher at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, as quoted by The Guardian.
The rapid rollout of generative AI has provoked a wide public backlash, most of it nonviolent — including community organizing against data centers and political candidates pushing for oversight. But at the fringes, researchers said, grievances against the AI industry are animating old extremist movements and creating new ones.
While early public discussion about AI and extremism focused on how terrorist groups could misuse tools like ChatGPT for propaganda, researchers now say the AI industry itself can radicalize people — not through chatbot conversations but through the speed of societal disruption, the narrative of existential threat, and the perception that the technology is being forced on society without accountability.
“It really transcends these left-right dichotomies,” said Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, as quoted by The Guardian. “We’re seeing a lot of different groups, a lot of different ideologies being framed through a lens of anti-AI.”
Veilleux-Lepage said the AI industry’s own messaging contributes to radicalization. When he gives talks to policymakers, one of his slides features a series of quotes from tech CEOs warning that AI could revolutionize or end the world. “To radicalize people, you don’t actually need to have theorists or ideologues that are calling people to violence against AI, because the tech CEOs are doing a pretty good case,” he said, according to The Guardian.
Altman has described changes from AI as difficult but ultimately positive and inevitable. On a podcast last year he said, “I expect some really bad stuff to happen because of the technology which also has happened with previous technologies,” The Guardian reported.
The industry has been spending heavily on security for executives. SpaceX revealed in its IPO filing earlier this year that it paid $4 million to Elon Musk’s private security firm last year, double what it spent two years earlier, The Guardian reported.
Researchers pointed to a historical lineage for the backlash, from the early 19th-century Luddite rebellion against automated knitting machines to the Unabomber’s 1995 anti-tech manifesto, published by the Washington Post and New York Times and still circulating online.
What distinguishes the current wave, Veilleux-Lepage said, is the speed and scale of AI-driven change. “Not only are these whole-of-society changes and not only are they really disruptive, they’re happening really quickly,” he told The Guardian. “There isn’t time for people to build resilience or to inoculate themselves from these changes.”
Major AI companies have hired national security and counter-terrorism experts to monitor threats. OpenAI’s head of intelligence previously was an academic expert on the Islamic State, The Guardian reported. OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for interviews about their security operations.
The Guardian reported that federal law enforcement documents obtained by Wired and the Intercept show U.S. authorities are increasingly monitoring anti-tech movements. Following the attempted arson at Altman’s home, authorities vowed that “the FBI will not tolerate threats against our nation’s innovation leaders.”
But Lubrano and other researchers warned that the government risks conflating legitimate protests and calls for regulation with fringe extremist views. “We have this opportunity to be proactive in this while avoiding mistakes that we’ve made in the past when responding to other forms of extremism,” Lubrano told The Guardian. “Something tells me that we’re not off to a great start.”