Public backlash to AI is intensifying — and transforming into real-world attempts at physical violence. Industry leaders are fearing for their lives. Leading AI companies and their top executives are beefing up security, the Wall Street Journal reports, as escalating anti-AI industry sentiment is culminating in threats and attempts of violence against the people and ventures building leading AI models. Some executives are even traveling with armed guards, while others have taken to keeping a lower public profile.
“Tech CEOs, a few years ago, definitely did not have security,” Dakota Dominguez, an executive at the Silicon Valley-based security firm JPT Security, told the WSJ. “A lot of tech companies now are incorporating that into their budgets.”
Earlier this year, the AI industry was shaken when a 20-year-old anti-AI activist named Daniel Moreno-Gama, armed with a gun and a Molotov cocktail, unsuccessfully tried to firebomb the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. No one was injured, but the high-profile incident followed a string of violent threats and at least one OpenAI lockdown.
OpenAI isn’t alone. Per the WSJ, around the time that Altman’s home was targeted, OpenAI rival Anthropic faced a close call when a man snuck into its headquarters behind an employee carrying an envelope with an executive’s name on it. The man reportedly then told a guard that the executive was “going to be killed.” The man was stopped before anyone got hurt.
All in all, it’s easy to see why tech leaders are budgeting for beefed up security.
Not all anti-AI sentiment has manifested in attempted physical violence. Activists have also shut down data centers, taken down AI-powered surveillance cameras, and protested outside AI company headquarters. As the fight over AI data centers heats up, some polls have shown that AI is less popular with Americans than Immigration and Customs Enforcement. People fear that AI will result in mass layoffs, a further consolidation of wealth and power, or even a catastrophic apocalypse — outcomes that many leaders in the AI industry have issued warnings about.
“That’s why people are setting warehouses on fire,” a former Pinterest employee named Bonnie Kate Wolf, who was laid off during an AI-focused restructuring, told the WSJ. “You can’t go back to serfdom. It really feels like the people in power want to be kings. Historically, that doesn’t work out for kings.”
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