AI Doomers Built a Radical Ideology. Now Their Followers Are Acting On It.

The movement that warned AI would end humanity has spawned a new wave of political violence.

Twice in one weekend, someone tried to target OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s San Francisco compound. On Friday at around 4 a.m., a suspect threw an incendiary device at Altman’s home, igniting a fire on an exterior gate before fleeing on foot. Then, on Sunday morning, two more suspects were arrested outside the same property, with one reportedly firing a weapon at Altman’s residence. A Honda sedan stopped in front of his compound, and a search of the vehicle turned up three firearms. Thankfully, no one was hurt in the attacks, which is the only reason we’re having a political conversation instead of a criminal one. But the political conversation is long overdue.

The most important question isn’t who threw the bottle, but what kind of ideas convinced someone it was a reasonable thing to do.

For years, a well-funded and pedigreed coalition of Effective Altruist-aligned intellectuals in Silicon Valley (we can call them “AI Doomers”) have prosecuted a very specific argument. Their claim is not that AI is annoying, or economically disruptive, or bad for teenagers on social media. Their claim is existential. Extinction-level. The Doomer-funded Center for AI Studies’s (CAIS) now-famous 2023 statement, signed by hundreds of AI researchers and executives, placed AI risk alongside *nuclear weapons* as a “priority risk.” Ideological leaders in the movement like Eliezer Yudkowsky have argued with genuine desperation that a misaligned superintelligence could end the human species. He is best known for his Doomer treatise, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, and another op-ed in Time titled "Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down."

Pause AI rally

Max Tegmark, another core element of the Doomer coalition, has weaponized his leftist billionaire funded Future of Life Institute to bankroll advocacy, films, and research all pointing toward one conclusion: the people building frontier AI are sleepwalking us toward oblivion. Tegmark has described AI innovation as a “cancer which can kill all of humanity.” In a 2023 Time piece, he wrote that “If unaligned superintelligence causes human extinction in coming decades, all other risks will stop mattering.”

Here is the paradox those thinkers have never adequately resolved: if the threat is truly existential, then what moral framework permits you to only write strongly worded op-eds and conference circuit speeches?

It is a serious philosophical problem baked into the utilitarian ethics that most EAs and AI “safety” advocates openly embrace. The larger the harm, the more extreme the justified response. If their “probability estimate” for AI-caused extinction is even modestly non-trivial, and they are a consistent utilitarian, the math starts generating conclusions that civilization-minded people should find alarming. Petitions and policy advocacy are preferred, sure. But when those institutions are deemed to have failed, when the compute keeps scaling and the AI companies keep shipping, at what point does democratic incrementalism become a moral abdication?

None of the prominent AI Doomer figures have answered this question. They have, commendably, condemned the violence. PauseAI, whose public Discord the Friday suspect had been a member of, issued a statement insisting that “violence against anyone is antithetical to everything we stand for.” Stop AI similarly rushed to the microphones, denying any involvement and declaring that it “seeks to protect human life.” These disavowals come off as sincere, and they matter in the sense that they are speaking out against their own comrades. But they don’t close the logical trap these movements have set for themselves, and for anyone listening closely to their arguments. And these ideas will almost certainly continue to indoctrinate and radicalize likeminded individuals into criminal action.

The suspect arrested Friday, 20-year-old Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, was booked on suspicion of attempted murder, arson, and possession or manufacture of an incendiary device. Investigators have not confirmed a motive. But the ideological ecosystem he inhabited offers strong clues. According to PauseAI, an organization that protests innovation in AI and demands an indefinite “pause” to AI technologies, Moreno-Gama had joined their public Discord server roughly two years prior and posted some 34 messages. The narratives he had been consuming, brick by brick, were authored by some of the most credentialed minds in Silicon Valley. The irony is potent: the same people who warned that a superintelligent AI might pursue its goals autonomously through any means necessary have built a social movement with a structural incentive to commit political violence. They have told a generation of anxious, hyper online young people that the most powerful companies in human history are building a machine that could end civilization. And now, when their followers are beginning to act on their incendiary rhetoric, they expressed shock and horror when some of those people don’t stop at signing an open letter.

The people who believe that AI will end civilization have built an ideology with no logical ceiling on justified action. They owe their followers and the public a direct answer to a simple question: if coalition building fails, if democracy proves too slow, if the companies keep shipping and the extinction clock keeps ticking, what then? Until they answer it honestly, the disavowals will ring hollow, and the Molotov cocktails from San Francisco’s newest class of political extremists will keep on coming.