Back in January, I had a conversation with someone named Daniel Moreno-Gama. He was a 19-year-old Texan with a part-time job, taking classes at a community college. He was worried about AI, and what he saw as the impending extinction of humanity.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because this week he was charged with attempting to kill OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In the early hours of Friday morning, authorities say, he hurled a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home. He then allegedly traveled to OpenAI’s headquarters and threatened to burn the building down.
Months earlier, my colleagues and I had found Moreno-Gama on a Discord server called Stop AI, where he was posting under the username Butlerian Jihadist (apparently he is a Dune fan). We were reporting an episode of our podcast series The Last Invention, where we’ve been documenting the debates around the attempt to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the digital supermind that the leading AI labs believe may profoundly change human life forever.
