If she didn’t get access to vegan food, she might die.
That’s what Ziz LaSota told a judge in February when she appeared via videoconference in Allegany County District Court in Maryland for her bail hearing.
Ziz, who is known widely by her first name, spoke haltingly in a weak voice, but interrupted the judge repeatedly. “I might starve to death if you do not intervene,” she said, asking to be released on bail. “It’s more important than whatever this hearing is.”
On its face, it seemed like a reasonable request. But prosecutors saw a ploy. They argued that Ziz, 34, was not just any inmate but the leader of an extremist group tied to a series of murders across the country. (The official charges against her involved trespassing, resisting arrest and a handful of misdemeanor gun charges.) She had skipped bail once before while being held in connection with a murder in Pennsylvania. Before that, she had faked her death to “escape investigation” in a different case, according to the Maryland district attorney. Besides, according to Capt. Daniel Lasher, assistant administrator of the Allegany County Detention Center, Ziz had been served vegan meals “from the get-go.”
The judge denied her bail request.
Ziz had been a minor celebrity within a slice of the Bay Area tech scene known as the Rationalists — a highly cerebral, extremely online group of tech and philosophy nerds dedicated to improving the world through logical thinking and deeply concerned with whether artificial intelligence will overtake the world and destroy humanity.
Over the years, the Rationalist movement has counted Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried among its community, and has influenced numerous figures, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Steven Pinker and Nate Silver. Perhaps more significant, for the tech workers building the A.I. tools that will undergird our world, Rationalism is something like a fraternity, and a shared language.
Ziz, who is transgender, started as a typical Rationalist — a geeky optimist hoping to save the world — but turned toward an ultraradical strain of the philosophy. She wrote favorably of violence, said she was willing to sacrifice everything to achieve her goals and considered A.I.’s threat to humanity “the most important problem in the world,” she once wrote. Now six people are dead, landing her and several friends and allies, known as the “Zizians,” in jail, awaiting trial. Many Rationalists worry that their community will be tinged by association with a group that, while not convicted of anything, has been compared in the press to the Manson family.
Ziz is not charged with carrying out any of the killings — a landlord in the Bay Area, the parents of one of the Zizians in Pennsylvania and a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont — but prosecutors suggest that she was the force behind the violence, which also claimed the lives of two Zizians. In addition to the Maryland counts, a federal grand jury indicted her in June on charges of possession of firearms and ammunition while a fugitive.
Through her lawyers, Ziz declined an interview request. Her lawyer in the Pennsylvania case said in a statement that Ziz was “wholly and unequivocally innocent of the charges filed in this case.” Law enforcement agencies declined to comment on the continuing investigation.
While Ziz became an outlier among the Rationalists — an eccentric among eccentrics, with ideas that most Rationalists reject — her story has drawn scrutiny to the movement, both by outsiders and adherents. She has come to represent its tendency to attract ambitious young people to the Bay Area, who often struggle to make ends meet and get mired in esoteric debates that can wall them off from society in an environment that embraces drugs and polyamory.
Whatever Ziz’s role, both Rationalists and their critics have drawn a connection between her beliefs and the violent outcome.
Some say the apocalyptic rhetoric around A.I. is a larger problem within the movement.
“There’s this all-or-nothing thing, where A.I. will either bring utopia by solving all the problems, if it’s successfully controlled, or literally kill everybody,” said Anna Salamon, the director of the Center for Applied Rationality, a nonprofit that has served as a hub for the Rationalist movement. “From my perspective, that’s already a chunk of the way toward doomsday cult dynamics.”
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer whose warnings about A.I. are canonical to the movement, called the story of the Zizians “sad.”
“A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home,” he wrote in a message to me, “and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.”
Her Religion Was Sith
Ziz, who grew up in Alaska as the oldest of three siblings, was home-schooled for some of her childhood. As a preteen boy, Ziz grew depressed. She saw puberty as “evil,” she later wrote on her blog, Sinceriously, and was horrified at the idea that she would be “killed-overwritten” by a new self.
She began to feel “like the world was a hypothetical,” she wrote. A key epiphany was realizing that even if she couldn’t fix her own problems, she could make things better for others. “One of the happiest thoughts I’ve ever had,” she wrote.
In the early 2010s, while attending the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where her father taught instructional design, she studied computer science and began reading online about the problem of existential risk, or “x-risk,” posed by A.I. In this sense, she was a typical budding Rationalist of the era, following debates about ethics and A.I. on a popular online forum, LessWrong, and devouring Yudkowsky’s fan-fiction work “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.” After dropping out of graduate school, she moved to the Bay Area in 2016, hoping to “contribute to saving the world” by working at a tech start-up and donating a portion of her income to charity. But she struggled to hold down a job.
For a time, Ziz found a community in the Rationalist scene. She attended house parties, meet-ups and workshops organized by the Center for Applied Rationality. She posted on LessWrong, weighing in on topics like logical paradoxes and optimizing decision-making.
Soon, she started taking hormones and posting under the name Ziz (a villain in an online fantasy story). More than six feet tall with long blond curls, often wearing a black cape and addressing people with names like “master Jedi” — she claimed her religion was Sith, the Darth Vader-aligned order in “Star Wars” — Ziz stood out.
Salamon, the director of the Center for Applied Rationality, met her at a workshop on A.I. safety in 2016. She remembers going on long walks with Ziz, who agonized over whether her own efforts to stop A.I. from going rogue would help or somehow backfire. (Ziz didn’t work on A.I. risk but debated it with Rationalists online; her blog had a niche following.)
Rationalists like to talk about a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. The theory imagines a future superintelligence that will dedicate itself to torturing anyone who did not help bring it into existence. By this logic, engineers should drop everything and build it now so as not to suffer later.
Ziz could not stop thinking about the basilisk. “Eventually I came to believe,” she wrote on her blog, “that if I persisted in trying to save the world, I would be tortured until the end of the universe by a coalition of all unfriendly A.I.s.”
Salamon told me that she had gotten the impression that Ziz wanted to feel special but found herself competing with many other young talents in the tech and A.I. safety scene. Ziz and her eventual crowd “came here hoping to become one of the main characters in the story, and then found out that they didn’t get to be one of the main characters,” Salamon said. “And then I think they were like, ‘To heck with that — we’re going to be the main characters anyway.’”
A Turn Toward a Cult
Ziz’s circle began to embrace cultish patterns: apocalyptic language, us vs. them thinking and the pitting of members against one another. She promoted a sleep-deprivation technique supposedly designed to determine one’s level of goodness, as well as radical veganism. She became obsessed with an obscure Rationalist theory that she interpreted to mean that one should never back down from a confrontation.
In 2017, she started recruiting participants to join what she called a “Rationalist Fleet,” living on boats on the ocean, including a rusty tugboat that they piloted from Alaska to a harbor south of San Francisco. This would solve several problems at once: They would save on rent in the pricey Bay Area housing market, and she would assemble a group of like-minded people to save the world. (Her parents had cut her off financially, and she applied for unemployment benefits.)
Ziz’s clique was predominantly transgender or nonbinary, and several worked or interned at tech outfits like Google, Oracle and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. One had dropped out of Rice University to work on A.I. safety. They would get into arguments with other Rationalists on the online platform Discord, but their logic could be hard to parse.
“We called them ‘the incomprehensible cluster,’” said Ozy Brennan, a Rationalist writer. In one Discord exchange, members of the group insisted on using Discord handles composed of symbols rather than alphanumeric characters. When moderators objected, the group accused them of transphobia.
“They’re like, ‘You are forcing us into legibility, and trans people are illegible, and this is an important expression of my identity,’” said Brennan, who is trans nonbinary. This view dovetailed with their belief that transgender women have a distinct neurotype that is particularly good at A.I. safety research, according to Brennan.
In November 2019, Ziz and several followers staged a protest at a venue deep in the woods northwest of San Francisco, wearing Guy Fawkes masks and robes. They were there to disrupt an event put on by the Center for Applied Rationality; the protesters distributed fliers claiming that the center and a sister organization had “betrayed us.” The center and the affiliated nonprofit were navigating allegations of sexual misconduct; they were also dealing with a sense within the community that instead of stopping runaway A.I., they had sped its arrival by encouraging so many talented people to work on A.I.
Someone called the police, saying the protesters had a gun — which was incorrect — and a SWAT team and a helicopter swarmed the area. Ziz and her crew were arrested and charged with, among other things, trespassing and resisting arrest.
According to Lt. Brandon Cutting of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, the protesters, when questioned by the police, emitted strange sounds — almost like speaking in tongues. “It didn’t make sense to us,” Cutting said, “and I suspect it didn’t to them, either.”
The Landlord Incident
The group became increasingly isolated from the broader Rationalist community. Ziz was barred from LessWrong, and some Rationalist event organizers hired security to keep her and her followers out. An anonymous Rationalist created a website, Zizians.info, which coined the term Zizians and served as a warning for potential recruits. “Ziz is a master manipulator,” the author wrote, and “is extremely skilled at selling people on nonsense ideas.”
On her own blog, Ziz began to write about violence more often, and more favorably. She listed categories of people who should be “airlocked” — video game terminology for killing.
By early 2020, Ziz and a handful of others had moved onto a lot in Vallejo, Calif., where they lived in small trucks and agreed to pay the 80-year-old owner, Curtis Lind, $2,000 a month. When Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on evictions because of Covid-19, the group stopped paying rent.
The Zizians, under pressure from the ongoing litigation over the protest, began to take strange measures. In August 2022, Ziz’s sister reported that Ziz had fallen overboard from a boat and disappeared. The Coast Guard was unable to find a body. An Alaskan newspaper ran a brief obituary.
After California’s eviction moratorium ended, the group still refused to pay rent, so Lind scheduled an eviction date with the Sheriff’s Office. One day in November, one of the Zizians asked Lind to take a look at a leaky outdoor water tap. When Lind bent down to inspect it, he blacked out, he later told an interviewer.
When he woke up, Lind said, he was covered in stab wounds and a samurai sword was sticking out of his chest, while three members of the group loomed over him with knives. He pulled out a gun and shot two of the Zizians, according to prosecutors, then stumbled away to get help. One would die of her gunshot wounds.
When the police searched the property, they found Ziz, who appeared to be ill. She was taken to a hospital — then disappeared.
“That’s when, from my perspective, they totally jumped the shark,” said Jessica Taylor, a Rationalist who was friendly with some of the Zizians. It was hard to see how stabbing a landlord would help humans build safe A.I., or achieve any other coherent goal. “Like, now it just seems like a violent homicidal gang.”
On the Lam
From there, the body count climbed. On Jan. 2, 2023, the parents of Michelle Zajko, a bioinformatician who was close to Ziz, were found dead in a bedroom of their Pennsylvania home, shot in the head. The police discovered that Zajko owned a handgun with bullets whose manufacturer and type matched the shells found near her parents’ bodies, and tracked her to a hotel in Chester, Pa.
There, they found two others: Ziz and Daniel Blank, an engineering graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, whom friends describe as sweet but naïve.
All three were arrested, but Blank and Zajko were released because there wasn’t enough evidence to hold them. Ziz, who had an active warrant in California, was charged with obstruction and disorderly conduct, but eventually made bail and vanished once more. Despite the gun and the appearance of possible motives — in a blog post, Zajko had referred to “abuse” by her parents; according to court records, she might stand to inherit her parents’ estate — the police have failed to tie any members of the group to the murders.
If the Rationalists had become wary of the Zizians after the Guy Fawkes protest, the attacks in Vallejo and Pennsylvania spurred a deeper fear. Someone posted a “community warning” about Ziz, urging people to call 911 if they saw her. LessWrong commenters debated possible motivations for the attacks, including Ziz’s interpretations of Rationalist ideas.
Things went quiet for a period. Then, in January this year, the violence resumed when Lind, the landlord, was stabbed to death. Prosecutors accused Maximilian Snyder, a then-22-year-old computer programmer and former Oxford University student affiliated with the group, of committing the crime to keep Lind from testifying against the Zizians who had attacked him.
Three days later, two other Zizians, Ophelia Bauckholt and Teresa Youngblut, were driving a Toyota Prius in Vermont when U.S. Border Patrol agents pulled them over. Law enforcement had been tailing the pair for days, after a hotel employee had seen them wearing black tactical gear and Youngblut carrying a gun. On the side of the highway, Youngblut stepped out of the car and began shooting at one of the agents while Bauckholt reached for a gun. The agents returned fire, according to an F.B.I. affidavit. Bauckholt was shot and pronounced dead at the scene; a Border Patrol agent, David Maland, died at a hospital.
Was Rationalism to Blame?
The Rationalist community debated how to respond. The killings seemed motivated less by ideology than by a mix of revenge and mental health problems. Yet Ziz had drawn inspiration from and, at least for a time, been deeply embedded in the Rationalist scene — at a recent meet-up in San Francisco, for example, a handful of people knew Zizians personally — which prompted uncomfortable questions.
“What can be done to prevent more killings?” a LessWrong administrator wrote in a January thread. Some contributors argued that they should have kicked Ziz out of the community sooner.
On Feb. 16, Ziz was arrested with Blank and Zajko in Frostburg, Md., after their trucks drew the attention of a suspicious property owner. Along with trespassing, obstruction and misdemeanor gun possession charges in Maryland, she faces felony drug charges added in June, plus charges of disorderly conduct and obstruction in the Pennsylvania case. In a hearing this month, the three asked for a joint trial.
Many Rationalists argue that the Zizians’ actions should not be a referendum on Rationalism itself. Zvi Mowshowitz, a Rationalist blogger, said in an interview that Ziz was simply a dangerous person who had latched on to Rationalism. If she had never discovered its teachings, would she “be leading a different cult?” he asked. “Based on what I know, I’d say the odds are, like, 55 percent.”
But for Rationalists concerned about A.I., the Zizians are at best an inconvenient distraction and at worst a threat to the movement’s goals — to the extent that they make people associate A.I. safety with extremist views. Many Rationalists still believe that A.I. could destroy humanity; indeed, Yudkowsky has co-written an upcoming book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.”
Yet Rationalists I spoke with said they didn’t see targeted violence — bombing data centers, say — as a solution to the problem. If anything, they see those measures as counterproductive, to say nothing of the near-random violence of the Zizians.
To Brennan, the Rationalist writer, the healthy response to fears of an A.I. apocalypse is to embrace “strategic hypocrisy”: Save for retirement, have children if you want them. “You cannot live in the world acting like the world is going to end in five years, even if it is, in fact, going to end in five years,” they said. “You’re just going to go insane.”
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