On Friday, a 20-year-old man who had reportedly publicized anti-AI thoughts on a personal Substack allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home in the middle of the night. A federal complaint alleges that the suspect, Daniel Moreno-Gama, intended to kill Altman and then tried to set fire to OpenAI’s headquarters nearby. On his alleged Substack, Moreno-Gama predicted that AI would cause human extinction. When arrested, Moreno-Gama was carrying a “manifesto” that detailed his anti-AI beliefs and listed the names of other AI executives, according to the complaint.

Two days later, a 25-year-old and a 23-year-old allegedly shot at Altman’s house from a car before fleeing. The pair were later apprehended. It’s unclear if they targeted Altman specifically.

The two incidents are the most visible attacks on the CEO of an AI company to date, and yet they come amid a wave of backlash, sometimes violent and other times not, against data centers and those who support AI’s physical infrastructure. 

The grievances fueling anti-AI sentiment are broad and overlapping. Workers in creative industries—writers, illustrators, voice actors, musicians—say the technology is already being used to replace them, trained on their own work without consent or compensation. Communities near planned data centers are pushing back against facilities that consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, straining local power grids and competing with residents for resources in regions already dealing with drought or aging infrastructure. 

Others worry about a more existential threat: that increasingly powerful systems could slip beyond human control, a fear stoked by prominent researchers who have warned that AI poses a risk to humanity’s survival. 

Echoes of the Industrial Revolution

Attacks on Altman show an escalating pattern of violence. Earlier this month, someone shot at the home of a city councilman from Indianapolis 13 times and left behind a note saying, “no data centers,” after the council member had voiced support for a data center project. A town near St. Louis of just 12,000 people also voted out all the incumbents on its town council last week after they approved a data center project, Politico reported.

Aleksandar Tomic, an economist and the associate dean for strategy, innovation, and technology at Boston College, told Fortune the escalating threats against AI are reminiscent of the upheaval ushered in by the Second Industrial Revolution more than 100 years ago.

“As tempting as it is to say this is just a disturbed individual, which most likely it is, I really think we see the parallels to then,” Tomic said. “Technology is moving really fast. A lot of people are feeling very anxious, but the institutions are lagging. And, you know, Sam Altman for better or worse, is kind of the face of AI.” 

The last time there was so much technological change so quickly, “it took us about 50 years to figure it out, and two world wars,” Tomic said.

The Second Industrial Revolution, which lasted from the late 1800s until the early 1900s, spurred massive change as people migrated from the countryside to the cities across countries including the U.S. At the time, many people who had previously toiled in the fields shifted to working long shifts in cramped, and often dangerous manufacturing and textile facilities while increasingly resenting the industrialists who owned the factories. This tumult gave rise to the political philosophies of communism and anarchism, as well as the early labor movement. 

Tomic argues we’re seeing a similar era of technological change now, and the changes may be even more pronounced owing to the rapid advancement of AI.

“It’s happening much quicker, and it’s happening at a much larger scale,” he said.

Public sentiment turns against AI 

A Stanford report published Monday shows public sentiment may be turning against AI. The percentage of people globally who are “nervous” about AI-powered products and services increased by 2 percentage points to 52% in 2025. Among the countries surveyed, 64% of people in the U.S. reported being nervous about the technology, more than 10 percentage points above the global baseline. 

Much of this may have to do with AI’s rapid development, and the fact that nearly two-thirds of Americans, according to the Stanford study, believe the technology will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years. 

The leaders of AI companies tend to agree. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously predicted that half of all white-collar jobs will be eliminated owing to AI. On Monday, Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark went further, predicting sweeping changes caused by AI.

“If we’re correct, this technology really is going to change the world in a vast way. It will change how businesses start, how business is done, aspects of national security, how we even relate to one another as people, and it’s impossible to reconcile that with a world where the economy doesn’t change in substantial ways as well,” Clark said during the Semafor World Economy conference.

To tackle potential mass layoffs, Tomic said the government will have to step in, much as it did last century with Social Security during a time of widespread poverty and changing demographics in the U.S., which saw the end of multigenerational living. Other shifts may occur this time, including policies that unlink health care from a person’s employer—which is how the majority of Americans receive health care—as formal employment becomes more uncertain.

“In addition to just making sure that we do implement the technology, and so on, we need to find a way to put people first, because otherwise, I think we have already undesirable effects,” he said.

Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, expressed some empathy for those who hold anti-AI views in a blog post following the first attack on his home on Friday. In the post, Altman said the fear and anxiety around AI are justified, as it will bring about the biggest change for society, possibly ever. He also encouraged “new policy” to “help navigate through a difficult economic transition.”

Yet he also said, overall, technological progress will make the future “unbelievably good” and called for a good-faith criticism and debate on the topic.

“While we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally,” he wrote.