Trending Articles
Trending Topics
Trending
In his famous poem “Concord Hymn,” Ralph Waldo Emerson described the start of the US Revolutionary War as “the shot heard round the world”. This month the AI industry got a shot of its own, with OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman having his home first firebombed, and then fired upon.
In the small hours of April 10 a man threw a Molotov cocktail at the house where Altman and his family live in San Francisco’s posh Russian Hill neighbourhood. Two days later a couple was arrested by police after a shot was fired at the same house. Thankfully no one was injured in either incident.
“Images have power, I hope,” Altman said in a blog post on the matter showing a picture 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.”
The firebombing attempt was perhaps the most worrying of the two attacks. According to the US Department of Justice Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, traveled from his home in Texas to carry out the attack, and then went to OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters and tried to break through its glass doors, threatening to kill everyone inside. Before the attack he penned an essay entitled “Your Last Warning,” where he listed AI companies and the investors behind them as targets for attack.
Attacks on CEOs, while rare, aren’t unknown in the US – last year Brian Thompson, the head of UnitedHealthcare, was murdered by Luigi Mangione in New York City for example. But the tech industry hasn’t been seen as risky in that regard.
That said, protective measures are taken. Meta reportedly spends over $20 million a year to protect its executives and personal security teams are publicly deployed for public events. For Steve Wozniak’s 60th birthday party in San Francisco he was accompanied by a burly British minder, and when I asked if he was security the response was “I’m one of them.”
But the attacks are a sign that some Americans are increasingly irate about the AI “revolution” and what it means for them in practical terms. While violence is unusual, there are increasing signs that the populace is getting fed up with AI and the data centres that power the technology – thankfully reflected in elections, not executions.
In elections in Festus, Missouri, this month four council members were voted out of office as voters rallied around opposition to a new data centre being built in the neighbourhood. Locals were concerned about the effect of the facility on water and electricity prices, as well as noise pollution, and they are not alone.
In Port Washington, Wisconsin, which is scheduled to have a new $15 billion, 1.3-gigawatt data centre run by OpenAI and Oracle, citizens voted by a margin of two to one for a resolution banning any new ones being built on city lands. In Maine the state legislature passed a bill banning data centres larger than 20 megawatts until November, 2027, although the state’s governor Janet Mills promptly vetoed the legislation.
Meanwhile, among AI consumers there is also mounting concern about the effects of the technology. On April 29, seven families in Canada filed a $1 billion lawsuit against OpenAI claiming it failed to spot signs that a local 18-year-old was planning a school shooting using AI. The woman then killed nine people, including six children in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, and injured 27 more, before killing herself.
“The Tumbler Ridge attack was an entirely foreseeable result of deliberate design choices OpenAI made with full knowledge of where those choices led,” the lawsuit claims.
Altman is clearly concerned about the matter and wrote a letter of apology to the community, which was published online. He pointed out that the woman’s ChatGPT account had been banned last June, but apologised that the company had not notified the local police.
This is an issue that isn’t going to go away thanks to flowery letters. On April 21 Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that the state is opening a criminal investigation into OpenAI over its use by the accused shooter who killed two people and injured seven more at Florida State University last year.
Uthmeier claims ChatGPT gave “significant advice” on what type of gun would be most effective to use in the attack and its effectiveness at close range, and has since expanded it – claiming that the AI bot also helped a murderer commit his crimes.
Even within the technology industry there’s increasing concern about AI and its effects, primarily by workers worried about their jobs. This month Meta confirmed rumours that it was culling 10% of its staff in May and cancelling 6,000 open roles within the company to offset the $125 billion to $145 billion it expects to spend on AI.
It doesn’t help morale within Meta that the company announced profits of $26.8 billion for the quarter this month, and that it is now going to log all employees keystrokes, mouse clicks and computer interaction to train its own AI systems. The spyware, dubbed the Model Capability Initiative, is widely suspected of being a way to replace more workers with AI engines that don’t need paying.
Even within the industry there are battles being fought over OpenAI. Elon Musk took the stand this week to testify in his $150 billion lawsuit against the company, claiming that he was misled into funding what he thought was a non-profit concern. OpenAI’s lawyers claim the lawsuit is retaliation for not allowing Musk to control the company. The case continues.
Any new technology brings disruption. But the amount of money swirling around AI, along with concerns over the technology and the infrastructure behind it, means the industry is now facing a perfect storm of criticism. Hopefully this will be non-violent but, as this month has shown, it might not be.
