The suspect arrested after gay Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home was firebombed last Friday morning was charged on Tuesday, capping an anxious weekend for Altman, the AI industry, and anyone concerned about the technology’s potential to unleash massive, as yet undefined change across the planet.

Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, was charged in California Superior Court with attempted murder, attempted arson, possession of an explosive device, and other charges in what authorities called a targeted attack on Altman and OpenAI over Moreno-Gama’s fears of artificial intelligence.

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Moreno-Gama was detained by San Francisco police after he attacked OpenAI headquarters in the Mission Bay neighborhood later the same morning, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Surveillance footage shows the Texas native throwing an outdoor chair at a glass door and holding what prosecutors said was a can of kerosene.

Moreno-Gama was carrying an “anti-AI document” in which he wrote that he was planning to kill Altman, the charging document alleges. He refers to humanity’s “impending extinction” by artificial intelligence and urges others sympathetic to his cause to “continue his work,” prosecutors said.

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Moreno-Gama was charged in federal court with attempted property damage and destruction with an explosive, as well as possession of an unregistered gun. The FBI said a charge of so-called “domestic terrorism” could follow after investigators determine a motive.

According to prosecutors, Moreno-Gama approached the side of Altman’s block-through compound on Russian Hill around 3:40 am Friday morning. He held a lit Molotov cocktail in one hand and threw it toward the house before fleeing the scene, security cameras revealed.

Guards on the property extinguished the flames.

On Sunday morning, Altman’s house was targeted again, according to SFPD.

Two individuals, Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, were booked on Sunday for negligent discharge of a firearm, after a Honda sedan with two people inside pulled up to the Lombard Street entrance to Altman’s property.

The person in the passenger seat put their hand out the window and appeared to fire a round, according to the police report, which cited surveillance footage and security personnel at the compound hearing a gunshot. The same camera captured the same car passing the home a few minutes before, the San Francisco Standard reported.  

Police identified the vehicle based on the car’s license plate just three blocks away on Taylor Street, where Tom and Hussein were detained minutes later.  

After the initial attack on Friday, Altman posted a photo of his partner and toddler to his blog, with a several-hundred word response to the firebombing and what he termed “an incendiary article about me”; out journalist Ronan Farrow’s 16,000 word viral takedown of Altman and AI in the New Yorker published last week may have inspired the attack, Altman inched up to saying.

He had initially “brushed aside” that thought, he wrote.

“Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives. This seems like as good of a time as any to address a few things,” Altman said, before launching into a defense of his own actions and a rebuttal of Farrow’s indictment of Altman’s role in what the writer terms a dangerous, industry-wide race to the bottom among AI leaders.

Altman stands out in Farrow’s story as an unrepentant liar.

When the OpenAI board pressed Altman on a pattern of deception after he was fired earlier in his tenure, the once-and-future CEO replied matter-of-factly, “I can’t change my personality.”

Prosecutors in Moreno-Gama’s case said the suspect’s writings also included threats against other leaders in the AI industry (along with their addresses), raising concerns about further attacks in response to the fast-evolving technology and the uncertainty surrounding it.

Groups evangelizing the threat of artificial “superintelligence” – no fans of Altman after he abandoned OpenAI’s original nonprofit mission to restrain the potentially apocalyptic technology – were forced to put distance between themselves and Moreno-Gama, if not his message of doom.

Moreno-Gama was linked to comments on Pause AI’s Discord server, including one post from last December that read, “We are close to midnight, it’s time to actually act,” Fortune reported. The group said Moreno-Gama joined its server two years ago and posted a total of 34 messages, none of which “contained explicit calls to violence.”

A second AI-skeptical group, Stop AI, had already been associated with violence against its stated target, though its most publicized action was simply a subpoena; the group publicly subpoenaed Altman while he shared a San Francisco stage with Warriors coach Steve Kerr last November.

The actions of 27-year-old Stop AI co-founder Sam Kirchner were more worrying.

Last fall, he threatened to go to several OpenAI offices in San Francisco to “murder people,” according to callers who notified police of his alleged plans. Altman issued a shelter-in-place order.

Later, Kirchner allegedly assaulted another Stop AI leader, Matthew Hall, during an internal dispute in which he reportedly suggested abandoning nonviolence. Kirchner is now missing.

Mareno-Gama had joined Stop AI’s online discourse, as well, the group said in a statement issued after the firebombing.  

He introduced himself, the group recounted, “then asked, ‘Will speaking about violence get me banned?’ After he was given a firm ‘Yes,’ he ceased all activities on our forum.”

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