OpenAI employees in San Francisco was told to stay at the office Friday afternoon after the company allegedly received threats from an individual who was previously associated with the activist group Stop AI.
“Our information indicates this [name] “StopAI has expressed an interest in physically harming OpenAI employees,” a member of the internal communications team wrote on Slack. “He was previously on site at our facilities in San Francisco.”
According to reports, just before 11 a.m., San Francisco police received a 911 call about a man allegedly threatening and intending to harm others at 550 Terry Francois Boulevard, which is located near the OpenAI offices in the Mission Bay neighborhood. data tracked by the Citizen crime app. Police scanner footage archived on the app describes the suspect by name and claims he may have purchased the weapon with the intention of targeting additional OpenAI locations.
Hours before Friday’s incident, a person flagged by police as allegedly posing a threat stated in a social media post that he was no longer a member of Stop AI.
WIRED reached out to the man in question but did not immediately receive a response. San Francisco police also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. OpenAI did not issue a statement prior to publication.
On Slack, the internal communications team shared three photos of a man suspected of causing threats. Later, a senior member of the global security team said: “There is no indication of an active threat at this time, the situation remains ongoing and we are taking moderate precautions as we continue to assess.” Employees were told to remove their ID badges when leaving the building and avoid wearing clothing with the OpenAI logo.
Over the past few years, protesters in groups calling themselves Stop AI, No AGI and Pause AI have staged demonstrations outside the San Francisco offices of several artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, over concerns that the unfettered development of advanced artificial intelligence could harm humanity. In February, protesters were arrested for closing the front door to OpenAI’s Mission Bay office. Earlier this month, StopAI said its public defender was the man who jumped on stage to subpoena OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during an on-stage interview in San Francisco.
In a Pause AI press release last year, the person police say allegedly threatened OpenAI employees was described as an organizer and quoted as saying he would think “life is not worth living” if artificial intelligence technologies were to replace humans in making scientific discoveries and taking over jobs. “Stopping AI could be seen as radical among people and technicians working on AI,” he said. “But it is not radical among the general public and does not completely stop the development of AGI.”