The AI backlash has a physical address

EARLY ON Friday, April 10th, Daniel Moreno-Gama — a 20-year-old from Spring, Texas, who works at a pizzeria and takes classes at Lone Star College — allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the Russian Hill gate of Sam Altman's San Francisco home, then drove to OpenAI's Mission Bay headquarters and attempted to smash his way in with a chair. Police found a manifesto on him that warned of humanity's "impending extinction" at the hands of AI and listed home addresses for executives at several frontier labs. Four days earlier, Ron Gibson, a city-county councilman in Indianapolis, had been woken before 1am by gunfire. His front door held 13 bullet holes. Under his doormat was a note: "No data centers."

The Altman attack has absorbed the coverage, and will continue to. Altman is famous; his assailant is a lone radical with a written creed and a pizzeria shift; the symbolism is Shakespearean enough that Altman himself reached for it in his blog response, quoting Tolkien on the corrupting "ring of power." Gibson's attacker remains at large. His district is 2,000 miles from San Francisco. His note reads like a line from a county meeting transcript, because that is essentially what it was. One story is about an idea. The other is about a rezoning vote.

Ground truth

But the Gibson attack is the more politically consequential of the two, and the industry's inability to see that is its actual problem. The violence against Altman is the radical tail of a movement; the politics expressed in Indianapolis is the mass of it. A Pew Research Center survey last summer found that 50% of American adults now feel more concerned than excited about AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021; Republicans and Democrats have converged at roughly identical levels of unease, a rare bipartisan consensus. The Stanford AI Index's 2026 report puts the gap between AI experts and the public at 50 percentage points on whether AI will improve jobs (73% of experts positive, 23% of the public), 48 points on the economy, and 40 points on medical care.