When a 20-year-old man from Texas was arrested earlier this year for allegedly trying to burn down OpenAI’s headquarters and Sam Altman’s home, authorities found an anti-AI manifesto with his lighter and a jug of kerosene. It was one of the attacks that raised alarm among researchers, the technology industry and law enforcement about the rise of anti-tech extremism.
In April, Italian “Nature Built” Instagram influencer was arrested in Rome and accused of planning a series of anti-tech attacks inspired by Ted “The Unabomber” Kaczynski. Two self-described “ecologists” who carried out an anti-Muslim attack on a mosque in San Diego last month cited ties to “AI slob” and JD Vance’s Balandira as motivations for their violence in their statement. An Indianapolis city councilman woke up to his house being shelled earlier this year, only to find a note reading “No Information Centers.”
The growing public backlash to the technology industry’s rapid exposure to artificial intelligence has taken many non-violent forms, such as organizing against data centers and local communities against political candidates. Still on the fringes, researchers say grievances against the AI industry and its leaders are reviving old violent extremist movements and fueling new ones.
“AI is becoming this driver of political violence, which is a very new phenomenon,” said Jordyn Abrams, a researcher on extremism at George Washington University.
While early public debates about AI and extremism focused on how nefarious actors, such as terrorist groups, could misuse products like ChatGPT for propaganda purposes or conspiracy attacks, recent attention has focused on how the AI industry as a whole can turn people into extremists. Researchers say it may not be a conversation with a chatbot that drives someone to extremist violence, but a society-wide disruption, a narrative of existential threat, and a lack of accountability brought about by the rise of AI.
Just as AI has come into many aspects of modern life, technology has filtered into the way extremists think about the world. Violent anti-government groups opposed to mass surveillance, environmentalists with environmental grievances, neo-Nazi accelerationists predisposing to the collapse of critical technological infrastructure, or the aggressive artificial intelligence that supposedly targeted Altman’s house destroy human intelligence.
“It really transcends this left-right dichotomy,” said Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, an associate professor at Canada’s Royal Military College. “We’re looking at different groups, different ideologies being framed through an anti-AI lens.”
People don’t have time to build morale’
The modern anti-technology movement has a long lineage. Periods of technological change have historically drawn backlash from the most affected populations, with researchers often pointing to the Luddite revolt of early 19th-century British textile workers who smashed automatic knitting machines as they demanded greater labor rights. The next 200 years brought waves of violent labor disputes and political violence, accompanied by market disruptions of technology, uneven accumulation of wealth, and disenfranchisement of workers.
In the 1990s, there was a cultural pushback against the rise of the personal computer and fears of how it would disrupt society. Common complaints include fears of displacement of the human workforce, environmental damage and the breakdown of healthy social structures.
“Don’t you hear? It wants your job. It pisses you off. It spoils your children. It’s cold, sterile, dehumanizing. Suddenly, it’s okay to hate your computer,” read a New York magazine cover of “New Luddites” in 1995.
In the same year that New York magazine published its cover story, the Washington Post and New York Times published the Unabomber’s anti-tech report, a 35,000-word tirade against the industry community that had proliferated online over the years.
What distinguishes anti-AI extremism from these earlier waves of technological backlash, the researchers say, is the speed and scale of how AI is bringing about economic, social and political change.
“Not only are these whole-of-society changes, they’re not just really disruptive, they’re happening very quickly,” Veilleux-Lepage said. “People don’t have time to develop resilience or pay themselves off from these changes”.
The AI industry’s long-standing talking points — that the technology will revolutionize the world, if not end it — lend themselves to a radical narrative that AI poses an existential threat and must be stopped at all costs. When Veilleux-LePage talks to policymakers about extremism against technology, one of her slides features a series of quotes from CEOs.
“You don’t need to have theorists or ideologues calling people to violence against AI to radicalize people, because tech CEOs are doing a good thing,” Veilleux-LePage said.
‘I expect some bad things to happen’
Altman has often framed the changes that AI will bring, which can be difficult, but ultimately both positive — after all, he describes change as inevitable.
“I expect some bad things to happen because of the technology that happened in previous technologies,” Altman said on venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz’s podcast last year.
While tech CEOs are publicly optimistic about societal resilience and the transformation AI will bring, it’s also clear that they’re privately concerned about the threat of political violence. Spending on personal security for executives has skyrocketed in the past five years amid incidents like the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, while tech leaders like Elon Musk are now paying millions for their own security. SpaceX disclosed in its IPO filing earlier this year that it paid Musk’s private security firm $4 million last year, more than double what it spent two years earlier.
Beset by widespread public distrust, there have been signs in the past year that the AI industry is changing its rhetoric. Altman said last month that AI won’t lead to the “jobs disaster” he once discussed, even if companies like Meta lay off tens of thousands of workers. OpenAI and Anthropic have both announced funds and think tanks aimed at helping civil society organizations adapt to AI this year, with OpenAI’s nonprofit offering $250m in grants to projects that help workers power the AI revolution.
Major AI companies hire national security, intelligence and weapons experts to monitor threats and misuse of their technology, including some with backgrounds in extremism and counterterrorism research. OpenAI’s intelligence chief previously served as one of the foremost academic experts on the Islamic State and wrote a book on the group’s belief that it would bring disaster. OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for interviews with their intelligence or security experts.
There is no non-violent way
Closing legal avenues to address public opposition to AI, as well as the perception that the technology is being forced on society, researchers describe as a gap in accountability that could further encourage terrorism and political violence.
Donald Trump, along with tech leaders, issued an executive order last year that sought to block any state-level legislation restricting AI development and said nothing would slow the U.S. in the global AI race. Tech billionaires are pouring millions of dollars into lobbying and political spending to try to prevent regulation of AI.
“When the authorities are too busy or don’t care enough to regulate and take action, victims are going to take action,” said Mauro Lubrano, a lecturer at the University of Bath and author of Stop the Machines: The Rise of Technological Extremism.
Federal law enforcement documents obtained by Wired and The Intercept show that U.S. authorities are increasingly monitoring anti-technological movements, while officials have announced a serious crackdown on violent attacks. Following the arson attempt at Altman’s home earlier this year, officials vowed that “the FBI will not tolerate threats against our nation’s innovation leaders.”
Still, officials warn of the risk of conflating nationwide protests and calls to regulate AI with more fringe, anti-technological extremist views that are imprecise and counterproductive. Plans aimed at mass surveillance and efforts to silence nonviolent anti-AI movements will inevitably backfire, Lubrano says, pushing people to more violent fringes if they feel their legitimate grievances aren’t being addressed.
“We have this opportunity to be proactive in this while avoiding the mistakes we’ve made in the past when responding to other forms of extremism,” Lubrano said. “Something tells us we’re not off to a great start”.
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