THE NEW YORK TIMES: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home targeted by molotov cocktail

A 20-year-old man was arrested Friday after throwing a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of Sam Altman, CEO of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, according to the company and the police.

The incendiary device lit a fire on the exterior gate of Mr Altman’s home before dawn, the San Francisco Police Department said in a statement.

The suspect then fled on foot but was found about an hour later, at the OpenAI headquarters about 3 miles away, where he was threatening to burn down the building, police said.

No one was hurt, and it was unclear if Mr Altman was home. Allison Maxie, a police spokesperson, said that charges were pending against the suspect, whom she did not name.

A notice sent to OpenAI employees said the suspect had thrown the device toward Mr ltman’s home about 3:45 a.m. and later was approached by security at the company’s headquarters.

The notice said there would be an increased police presence around the company’s offices.

Public records indicate that Mr Altman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, lives in a compound in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighbourhood, near the twisty section of Lombard Street.

The compound includes a property purchased for $27 million through a shell company in March 2020.

Mr Altman, whose company is best known for running the AI application ChatGPT, has also been newly involved in San Francisco politics.

He served on the transition team for Mayor Daniel Lurie, a Democrat, before his inauguration in January 2025, and was among several billionaires who last year helped persuade President Donald Trump to abandon a plan to send immigration agents into the city.

In recent years, Mr Altman and OpenAI have been targets for protests against AI, which can be used for generating text and media, creating code and doing research. Its critics have warned that the technology threatens humans.

Last month, protesters gathered outside the San Francisco offices of several AI companies — Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI and OpenAI. Led by Michaël Trazzi, a critic of the technology, they demanded that the CEOs of major AI companies commit to pausing development of the technology if other labs did the same.

Protesters had also descended on OpenAI’s office this year after the company said it had agreed to provide its technology to help the Defense Department.

And in November, the company locked down its offices after it said a person who had previously been associated with an anti-AI group had “expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees.”

That group, Stop AI, has held protests at OpenAI’s office — including blocking the doors — but has emphasised that it is committed to nonviolence.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for what it said was copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2026 The New York Times Company