The San Francisco home of OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman was attacked with a Molotov cocktail on Friday, April 10. The suspect was arrested outside the company’s office after, police said, he threatened to set the building on fire.
San Francisco police said a 20-year-old man was arrested at about 5 a.m. on Friday. Roughly an hour earlier, an “incendiary destructive device” had been thrown at the house in the North Beach residential district.
In a statement, OpenAI confirmed the attack and said the same individual had earlier “made threats” against the company’s San Francisco headquarters, where he was later taken into custody. The company said no one was injured in either incident. Police added that the suspect had “threatened to burn the building down”.
“This individual is in custody, and we are cooperating with law enforcement as the investigation proceeds,” a company spokesperson said. It remained unclear whether Altman had been at home at the time of the attack.
Police said the attack set the home’s outer gate ablaze. North Beach, just north of San Francisco’s financial district, is considered an affluent area and is popular with people working in the technology industry.
This was not the first such episode: in November, OpenAI had already closed its office after receiving threats from an activist opposed to artificial intelligence, Wired reported.