OpenAI employees The company was told to stay inside a San Francisco office on Friday afternoon after reportedly receiving a threat from a man previously associated with the Stop AI activist group.
“Our information indicates that [name] “StopAI has expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees,” a member of the internal communications team wrote on Slack. “He has previously been on site at our San Francisco facilities.”
Just before 11 a.m., San Francisco police received a 911 call about a man allegedly making threats and intending to harm others at 550 Terry Francois Boulevard, which is near OpenAI’s offices in the Mission Bay neighborhood, according to data tracked by crime app Citizen. A police scanner recording stored on the app describes the suspect by name and alleges he may have purchased weapons with the intention of targeting additional OpenAI locations.
Hours before the incident on Friday, the person who allegedly made the threat said in a post on social media that he was no longer part of Stop AI.
WIRED contacted the person concerned but did not immediately receive a response. San Francisco police also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. OpenAI made no statement prior to publication.
On Slack, the internal communications team provided three images of the suspect making the threat. Later, a high-ranking member of the global security team said, “At this time, there is no indication of active threat activity, the situation is ongoing and we are exercising an abundance of caution as we continue to evaluate.” Employees were told to remove their badges when leaving the building and avoid wearing clothing with the OpenAI logo.
Over the past few years, protesters belonging to groups calling themselves Stop AI, No AGI, and Pause AI have demonstrated outside the San Francisco offices of several AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, with concerns that the unfettered development of advanced AI could harm humanity. In February, protesters were arrested for blocking the front doors of OpenAI’s Mission Bay office. Earlier this month, StopAI claimed that 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 last year’s Stop AI press release, the man accused by police of making threats against OpenAI employees is described as an organizer and quoted as saying that he would find “life not worth living” if AI technologies replaced humans in making scientific discoveries and taking jobs. “AI can be seen as radical among AI people and technocrats,” he said. “But it is not radical among the general public, nor is it stopping AGI development altogether.”