OpenAI closes San Francisco offices after alleged threat from activist

OpenAI employees at San Francisco was asked to remain inside the office Friday afternoon after the company received an alleged threat from someone previously associated with the activist group Stop AI.

“Our information indicates that [name] “From StopAI he expressed his desire to cause physical harm to OpenAI employees. He was previously on site at our facility in San Francisco,” a member of the internal communications team wrote on Slack.

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, near the OpenAI offices in the Mission Bay neighborhood, according to the British Daily Mail. Data She is being tracked by the crime app Citizen. A police scanner recording archived in the app describes the suspect by name and claims he may have purchased weapons with the intent of targeting additional OpenAI sites.

Hours before Friday’s incident, the person police identified as the one who posted the thread said he was no longer part of Stop AI in a social media post.

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 provide a statement prior to publication.

On Slack, the internal communications team provided three photos of the man suspected of making the threat. Later, a senior member of the global security team said: “At this time, there is no indication of active threat activity. The situation remains ongoing and we are taking measured precautions as the assessment continues.” Employees have been asked to remove their badges when exiting the building and to avoid wearing clothing bearing the OpenAI logo.

Over the past two years, protesters belonging to groups calling themselves Stop AI, No AGI, and Pause AI have held demonstrations outside the San Francisco offices of several AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, over concerns that unfettered development of advanced AI could harm humanity. In February, demonstrators were arrested for… Lock the front doors To OpenAI’s Mission Bay office. Earlier this month, StopAI claimed that its public defender was the man who jumped on stage to call out OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. During an interview on stage In San Francisco.

In a “Stop AI” press release last year, the person who police said allegedly made the threat against OpenAI employees was described as an organizer, and quoted as saying that he would find “life is not worth living” if AI technologies replace humans in making scientific discoveries and taking jobs. “The AI ​​pause may be seen as an outlier among AI people and technologists,” he said. “But it is not extreme among the general public, and it does not stop the development of artificial general intelligence completely.”