A 20-year-old man was arrested on Friday after throwing a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of Sam Altman, chief executive of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, according to the company and the police.
The incendiary device lit a fire on the exterior gate of Mr. Altman’s home before dawn, the San Francisco Police Department said in a statement. The suspect then fled on foot but was found about an hour later, at the OpenAI headquarters about three miles away, where he was threatening to burn down the building, the police said.
No one was hurt, and it was unclear if Mr. Altman was home. Allison Maxie, a police spokeswoman, said that charges were pending against the suspect, whom she did not name.
A notice sent to OpenAI employees said the suspect had thrown the device toward Mr. Altman’s home at about 3:45 a.m. and later was approached by security at the company’s headquarters. The notice said there would be an increased police presence around the company’s offices.
Public records indicate that Mr. Altman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, lives in a compound in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood, near the twisty section of Lombard Street. The compound includes a property purchased for $27 million through a shell company in March 2020.
Mr. Altman, whose company is best known for running the A.I. application ChatGPT, has also been newly involved in San Francisco politics. He served on the transition team for Mayor Daniel Lurie, a Democrat, before his inauguration in January 2025, and was among several billionaires who last year helped persuade President Trump to abandon a plan to send immigration agents into the city.
In recent years, Mr. Altman and OpenAI have been targets for protests against A.I., which can be used for generating text and media, creating code and doing research. Its critics have warned that the technology threatens humans.
Last month, protesters gathered outside the San Francisco offices of several A.I. companies — Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, and OpenAI. Led by Michaël Trazzi, a critic of the technology, they demanded that the chief executives of major A.I. companies commit to pausing development of the technology if other labs did the same.
Protesters had also descended on OpenAI’s office this year after the company said it had agreed to provide its technology to help the Defense Department.
And in November, the company locked down its offices after it said a person who had previously been associated with an anti-A.I. group had “expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees.” That group, Stop A.I., has held protests at OpenAI’s office — including blocking the doors — but has emphasized that it is committed to nonviolence.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for what it said was copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports for The Times on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice.
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