These unsettling incidents have set off alarms in and around the AI industry. There’s long been a vocal resistance to the technology, fueled by fears of job displacement, climate impact, and unconstrained development absent of safety guardrails. AI workers themselves have warned about serious risks. The vast majority of critiques and demonstrations against AI have been nonviolent — including local resistance to energy-intensive AI data centers and protests urging a slowdown of the rapidly accelerating technology. Protesters have targeted AI companies directly with tactics like hunger strikes.

Groups that advocate against accelerated AI development explicitly denounced violence following the attacks on Altman’s home. Further investigation will take place to determine the attackers’ motivations. But the limited information made public so far suggests an escalation of the backlash against the technology, and, perhaps, risk to industry players themselves.

Over the past few years, there has been a handful of other notable incidents rising to the level of threats and harassment aimed at local officials, according to a database of reports compiled by Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative. Last year, for example, a community utility authority board member in Ypsilanti, Michigan, reported that masked protesters visited his home to protest a “high performance computing facility,” according to MLive, and one protester allegedly smashed a printer on their lawn.

Shortly after the first attack on Altman’s home, the CEO appeared to partially blame critical media coverage for the violence. Days earlier, The New Yorker had published a lengthy investigation that compiled over a hundred interviews and found that many people who had worked with him distrusted him and found inconsistencies in his actions. “There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago,” Altman wrote on his personal blog. “Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me. 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.” (He later walked back his rhetoric toward the article in response to a critique on X, writing, “That was a bad word choice and i wish i hadn’t used it.”)