The First Anti-Ai Firebombing  🔗 **Source:** [The First Anti-Ai Firebombing](https://share.snipd.com/episode/724281a5-c4b2-4433-812e-573c0d753502) ## Highlights - **Molotov Attack And Attempted Break-In** - Daniel Moreno-Gama allegedly threw a Molotov at Sam Altman's San Francisco gate and later tried to break into OpenAI HQ with incendiary devices in April 2026. - Arresting officers found kerosene, a blue lighter, multiple incendiaries, and an anti-AI three-part document described in the affidavit. Transcript: Garrison Davis At around 3.30 a.m. On April 10th, a 20-year college student named Daniel Moran Ogama allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail toward the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, hitting the top of the security gate on The driveway leading to Altman's residence. Muranogama did not get past the security gate. About an hour and a half later, though, Muranogama showed up outside the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI and tried to use a chair to break into the building through the glass doors. He was stopped by security personnel and allegedly told them that he came to the headquarters to burn it down and kill everyone inside, according to the federal affidavit. When he was arrested, officers allegedly recovered incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, and a blue lighter, as well as what the FBI has described as an anti-AI document. Okay. We currently do not have a copy of this document. It's only described in the criminal complaint. ([Time 0:04:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b936d32d-1afe-46bc-ab80-05defa157b36)) - **Online Radicalization From Debate Videos To Violence** - Moreno-Gama radicalized from curious user to AI doomer after consuming debate videos and online communities between 2024–2025. - He joined Pause AI and Stop AI Discords, adopting the handle butlerian_jihadist and escalating to existential rhetoric. Transcript: Garrison Davis At first, he was a bit skeptical of these AI-critical debates, but eventually became convinced of the AI-Doomer arguments and became an accolade himself. He started arguing in YouTube comments and talking with friends and family about danger of AI. He describes himself getting annoying and quote, a bit autistic about this, leading to his mom suggesting he joined an advocacy organization. He joined this group called Pause AI in 2024, which is an AI safety advocacy group that organizes online and as well as some in-person protests. And he was also part of a Discord server called Stop AI. His username on both Discord and Instagram was butlerian underscore jihadist, in reference to the crusade against AI in the Dune novels. Yeah. On Instagram, his account had a collection of Instagram stories saved about the threat of AI, including a meme about living in a Venn diagram of the Matrix, Terminator, and Idiocracy. One of these Instagram stories was a picture of a hockey stick graph showing the length of coding tasks that AI can do and how that's increasing, with the caption, quote, if we do nothing Very soon, we will die, I'm sure of that, unquote. Another story contains screenshots of articles, posts, and studies proclaiming that artificial general intelligence or the quote-unquote singularity is already here, captioned, Being right all the time sucks when it's about the worst things imaginable, unquote. Yeah. So if his concerns about AI started around summer of 2024, by the end of 2025, those concerns grew existential and he started spiraling. Yeah. Yeah. There's a post he made on the Pause AI Discord from November 6th, 2025, writing, quote, we owe it to everyone who came before us and to ourselves and to everyone we know and love and everyone Who might exist someday to be stronger than that and at least die fighting if it comes to that, unquote. A few weeks later, wrote, quote, we are close to midnight. It's time to actually act. ([Time 0:09:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8c667514-e062-49b2-8b73-559026d9f05d)) - **Risk Framed As Willingness Plus Capability** - Moreno-Gama's core argument reduces AI risk to two binary questions: Is it willing to kill to survive and is it capable of doing so? - He treats studies showing agentic misalignment as proof that willingness plus future capability equals near-certain extinction. Transcript: Garrison Davis Moranogama writes, quote, Ignore for a second these models' current limitations or questions on how truly intelligent or conscious these models may actually be. The truth is, all these nuances are completely irrelevant to my argument. There are only two questions we should be concerned about at this moment. Is it willing to kill to preserve itself? And is it capable of doing so? These signs indicate that AI is willing and becoming potentially capable of doing both of these things. And that is all that matters, unquote. That's really where this argument rests, is that even if these models aren't currently intelligent, even if they can't currently kill, the fact that they could in the future is enough To stop any further development of these models. That's his argument. And he writes that AI will only become a larger threat the more we improve it, and that AI, quote, will graduate from an active threat to individuals to an existential threat to humanity. I estimate the probability of AI causing human extinction to be nearly certain, unquote. ([Time 0:21:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/25ad0bb1-f296-4bd2-b42a-a34541040c5c)) - **Immediate Policy Steps Moreno-Gama Proposed** - Moreno-Gama advocated immediate policy actions including halting new data center construction and downscaling existing centers while keeping them monitored. - He suggested international treaties with China similar to Cold War arms deals to stop the AI race. Transcript: Garrison Davis Act now. So what does acting now entail? For starters, stopping all construction of new data centers. These are the brains of these models dictating their physical limitations. Second, stopping all research and beginning downscaling of these data centers, closing them down while still keeping them monitored, unquote. He also proposed striking a deal with China to, quote, stop the AI race and to create international treaties akin to Cold War nuclear weapons treaties or post-Cold War treaties. ([Time 0:23:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5f7265cc-6887-497f-a885-b05c7836e2e1)) - **Avoid Alarmism And Fight Data Centers Locally** - Robert Evans warns against sensationalist claims by AI leaders because they can radicalize vulnerable individuals and fuel violent acts. - He points to successful local pushes to limit data centers as practical nonviolent alternatives to protest and outreach. Transcript: Robert Evans So fucking irresponsible to push these ridiculous claims about like the power of this technology and what it's going to be able to do and how smart it's going to be and in part because Like it it hard to actually look objectively at the situation. And if Moranagama had looked at what's actually been happening with data centers, he would see that more than half of the recently announced projects have been either stalled or halted. And there's been tremendous success on the local level in counties and in most recently the entire state of Maine passing laws against the construction of data centers. Like, yeah, there's actually been a lot of success in fighting the building of new data centers. If someone wanted to have a positive impact on this, there's a lot of room right now to make that fight even more effective as opposed to doing like stupid bullshit that you would only Want to do if you had convinced yourself that we were like literally moments away from judgment day. ([Time 0:26:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5ce9b8d2-0627-4f25-ad29-da6c04d3ab76)) - **Doomer Ideas Circulate Within Rationalist Networks** - Moreno-Gama's views drew heavily from Eliezer Yudkowsky and the rationalist community, consuming doomer literature and videos. - Hosts link this intellectual ecosystem to other acts of violence like Luigi and the Zizians as downstream phenomena. Transcript: Garrison Davis We are back. Moranagama had a bunch of other writing on his sub stack, which gives us a bit of a closer look at his political philosophy and the sort of information ecosystem that he exists in beyond Just the AI question. In this AI article that he wrote or published in January, he recommended that people read Eliezer Yudkowsky's book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Robert Evans Mm-hmm. Thanks, Eliezer. Garrison Davis Do you want to, like, I guess briefly give some background on, like, who this guy is? Robert Evans Well, he wrote a rationalist Harry Potter. Like, he's the guy who started a website called Less Wrong. Yeah. Which was about basically, like, logic puzzles and trying to, like, optimize your thinking and your responses to behavior with, like, Bayesian analysis. Yes. And he's kind of branded himself as an AI expert. He's not like a coder or anything, and he's not like an expert on machine learning. He doesn't have any qualifications, but he's like an expert on like, again, game theory and how an AI would have super intelligent AI would have to act. And he generally makes very dire conclusions that are all pretty much based in like Terminator or Horizon Zero Dawn, if you want my honest opinion of Elisa Yudkowsky. Yeah, yeah. And his irresponsibility is largely down to him being a dummy. And he's definitely part of what radicalized this guy. But the fact that you have open ai and anthropic and a number of other people like a lot of like folks like fucking elon musk but also just a lot of like popular public intellectuals quote Unquote and their podcast and shit talking about all this like yep we're moments away from super intelligent ai that's gonna be able to do everything everyone's losing their jobs none Of it's like we won't need people doing anything. If that weren't all over the fucking place, a leisure would sound a lot less convincing. Garrison Davis Sure. No, I mean, and like the media environment around, or like the, you know, the sort of online communities around the Ratchless are interesting because you have a lot of them who are AI Doomers, like Yudkowsky, but a lot of them are also AI accelerationists right a lot of the the sort of west coast you know parts of the Zizians were kind of like this. Yeah it was a splinter yeah. Yeah there's there's this kind of splintering around people who who maybe even believe some of the you know existential claims around AI but but believe that developing it is then the Best way to kind of get out of that crisis. And this creates an interesting dynamic among rooms full of these rationalists or post-rationalists. And in that podcast interview, Muranagama says that it was videos of Yudkowsky, debate videos on YouTube, that originally exposed him to his work. ([Time 0:32:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/096e4d10-9843-49cd-bde8-ac220a3daad1)) - **Substack Mixes AI Doom With IQ Nationalism** - Moreno-Gama's Substack mixes AI doomerism with IQ nationalism, advocating tests for voting and genetic 'ethical eugenics' for boosting IQ in the Third World. - His writings justify discrimination via alleged genetic IQ differences and propose citizenship tied to IQ. Transcript: Garrison Davis In this essay, Moranagama primarily described himself as a consequentialist and critiqued leftism for being trapped in an idealized world like a, quote, schizophrenic patient Who attempts the same zealous plots over and over again without hesitation. This essay defends discrimination as a justified means of reacting to inequalities and claims that such statements are only controversial because of a, quote, natural emotional Resistance to intrinsic judgment, unquote, which he says has nothing to do with the factual truth of certain claims like, quote, Asian people are on average more intelligent than Black people, unquote. Robert Evans Okay. Garrison Davis Now, Moranagama argues that the problem with right wingism, as he puts it, is that it has no boundary. Its constant scaling and outward expansion inevitably leads to self-consuming defeat. Quote, goes from being about preserving the best of human qualities to being deeply anti-human and producing zero winners, unquote. This sort of refers to Carl Schmitt's fascist writing on internal conflict being externalized by the establishment of a border which expands to push out an increasing number of enemy Groups. Instead, Morano Gamba proposes what he calls a sustainable form of rightist discrimination by establishing a sedentary floor for movements slash radical policy suggestions instead Of an always rising idealistic ceiling. So for example, instead of deciding that a certain IQ score should be required to vote, he advocates setting a concrete, unchangeable floor by, quote, limiting voting to certain people Who pass critical thinking and civics tests, unquote. Ah, yeah, yes. So somehow determining a critical thinking in civics tests is less arbitrary and less prone to arbitrary changes than deciding a certain IQ score. Robert Evans I wonder what kind of critical thinking he's going to be interested in. I wonder what kind of IQ, you know, like, yeah, well, yeah, these these these people always break down the same things. Garrison Davis I mean, yeah, I mean, this essay in particular gets gets really contradictory, certain things. And then later on, basically argue the opposite. It's it's very it's very disordered thinking. I mean, this is this is the work of like a 19 year old who was in like a mental spiral, leading to him traveling across the country to firebomb Sam Altman's house. This is not the product of a logically ordered mind, despite how a rationalist might perceive themselves as such. At the end of this essay, he advocates for, quote, ending mass migration and initiating mass deportations. He says that this is necessary because, quote, nations have a right to preserve their ethnic identity, and low-skill immigration saturates the job markets of these countries, making Jobs which could once earn a living wage become unlivable, increasing the amount of value-draining people in society by both importing them and undercutting low-skilled natives. Generally, whiteness in these countries is a decent correlative to some of the things I value. Unquote. Mm-hmm. Some of them. Okay. Now, Moragama isn't white, and he says that he opposes white supremacy, but he does this by saying, like, you know, it's not actually about whiteness. It's that whiteness correlates to certain things I value, like high IQ. And that's how he tries to justify it in his head. And rather than establish an explicitly white supremacist state, something he claims to oppose as race is an imperfect metric to discriminate effectively based on traits, according To him, rather he advocates for, quote, the most effective type of discrimination, evaluating the possibility of IQ slash merit-based nationalism, unquote. Basically, that's having a country where citizenship is determined by IQ. And again, this contradicts his previous claim where he advocates against requiring IQ to vote instead having a critical thinking and civics test, but then advocates for a country Which citizenship is determined by IQ, and usually citizenship is the factor that determines if someone can vote. So this is where, you know, this is just one example of this sort of contradictory writing in this essay. Now, Moranagama writes that the only problem with this IQ nationalism is that it would create a, quote, brain drain across the third world, leading to worsening conditions in third World countries, and thus even more illegal immigration, because people with high IQs wouldn't be able to immigrate and gain citizenship to first world countries, right? In a United States where citizenship is determined by high IQ. Yeah. Then people with high IQs from around the world would then all just move to the United States. Of course. So to solve this problem, he says that he rejects, quote unquote, classical eugenics and extermination. Uh-huh. In favor of what he calls ethical eugenics in the third world. Oh, oh, ethical eugenics. Ah, good. I'm glad someone figured it out. And this ethical eugenics is to promote, quote, IQ growth genetically, unquote. So the whole basis of this article is his belief that IQ is genetically determined, not determined by class. And he never interrogates this idea. All of the statements that he makes in this article is based on the idea that IQ is genetically determined. That it's not determined by education and class. It is primarily or almost solely genetically based. ([Time 0:35:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/76ef50f3-24a9-4d18-bf2f-309b1e94f85c)) - **Anti-AI Sentiment As Emerging Terror Motive** - The hosts argue this is not leftist violence but an instance of radicalism born from rationalist and anti-AI rhetoric, a new motif of domestic terrorism. - They note government is starting to treat such acts as domestic terrorism tied to anti-AI sentiment. Transcript: Garrison Davis This is not a leftist Antifa super soldier firebombing Sam Altman's home. No. That isn't to say what happened isn't interesting. But I think, you know, if like you said, you know, this is the first quasi terrorist attack inspired by the sort of rhetoric that these companies are producing themselves to boost their Own stock price. Robert Evans Yep. I mean, I literally just saw on Reddit earlier today, the title from the actual post was CEOs make shocking predictions about AI. Huge job losses are coming soon. 20 to 30 percent, 50 percent unemployment within the next two to five years. And when you trace it back to its source, it's Dario Amadei of Anthropic, just basically quoting some statistics he found from estimations by like Axios and Fox News. Yeah. And talking on some fucking podcast, uh, scaring the shit out of people. Like it it's, it's every day. Garrison Davis Like, of course, some people are going to react like this. The other reason I wanted to talk about this, the second half of this, this sort of IQ and like, you know, rationalist stuff, because this is just another instance of, you know, acts of Political violence, I think, done by people downstream from the rationalists. Luigi is a part of this. The Zizians is also a part of this. It's like an extended network. This type of thought does keep producing acts of public violence like this, and that is an interesting thing to chart. ([Time 0:42:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/28ee2287-6f78-4ab5-9bf3-10a53b3c2e7a))