OpenAI suspends offices in San Francisco after alleged threat from activist

OpenAI employees in San Francisco was ordered to remain in office Friday afternoon after the company reportedly received a threat from a person previously associated with the activist group Stop AI.

“According to our information, (Name) from StopAI has expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees,” a member of the internal communications team wrote on Slack. “He was previously on-site at our facilities in San Francisco.”

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 the OpenAI offices in the Mission Bay neighborhood Data tracked by the crime app Citizen. A police scanner recording archived on the app describes the suspect by name and claims he may have purchased weapons to attack additional OpenAI locations.

Hours before Friday’s incident, the person reported by police as a suspected threat maker said in a social media post that he was no longer part 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 comment prior to publication.

On Slack, the internal communications team posted three images of the man suspected of making the threat. Later, a senior member of the global security team said: “There is currently no evidence of active threat activity, the situation remains ongoing and we are taking measured precautions while the assessment continues.” Employees were instructed to remove their ID cards when leaving the building and to avoid wearing clothing with the OpenAI logo.

In recent years, protesters affiliated with the groups Stop AI, No AGI, and Pause AI have held demonstrations outside the San Francisco offices of several AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, because they fear that the unrestricted development of advanced AI could harm humanity. Protesters were arrested in February Locking the front doors to the OpenAI office in Mission Bay. Earlier this month, StopAI claimed its public defender was the man who jumped on stage to subpoena OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a stage interview in San Francisco.

In a press release from Pause AI last year, the person who police allege made the threat 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 scientific discoveries and job taking. “Pause AI could be seen as radical among AI people and engineers,” he said. “But it is not radical among the general public and does not stop AGI development entirely.”