The disappearance of Stop AI co-founder Sam Kirchner in November 2025 has exposed a growing rift within the anti-artificial intelligence movement, as hardline activists abandon nonviolent tactics and raise security concerns at companies including OpenAI.
A growing anti-artificial intelligence movement in the San Francisco Bay Area is drawing activists who fear the technology will cause human extinction, with some abandoning nonviolent tactics and raising security alarms at companies including OpenAI.
"The ship may have sailed on nonviolence," Sam Kirchner, a 27-year-old co-founder of the activist group Stop AI, told a colleague days before he vanished in November 2025, according to Matthew Hall, a fellow activist who shared a cramped Oakland cottage with Kirchner. Hall said he feared for the safety of both Kirchner and OpenAI employees after the comment.
Kirchner's disappearance triggered a police warning that prompted OpenAI to lock down its headquarters, issue an internal security alert with his photo, and advise employees to stop wearing company-branded clothing in public, according to media reports at the time. The San Francisco Police Department said it made efforts to contact Kirchner but has not been able to locate him. A synopsis provided by the department said OpenAI officials told officers that Kirchner "made threats against employees of the business through another subject but was never on scene."
The incident marks an escalation in what has become ground zero for a hardening resistance to the world's hottest technology. The Bay Area's AI boom is drawing young disillusioned men and women to join the fight against it, upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups. Seventy percent of U.S. adults believe AI will cost jobs, and 55% believe it will do more harm than good in their daily lives, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.
The Radicalization of Anti-AI Activism
Kirchner, an electrical engineering technician by training, was arrested three times in the Bay Area in the fall of 2024 — twice for blocking entrances at one of OpenAI's San Francisco offices and once for blocking traffic outside another. He had previously been expelled from Pause AI US, a group founded by Holly Elmore, a 34-year-old Harvard Ph.D., after pushing for acts of civil disobedience such as blockades. Elmore said she drew the line at illegal activity and kicked Kirchner out.
"He did sleep in his truck, and he was very willing to just rough it," Elmore recalled of Kirchner's early dedication. She said she got divorced because of starting Pause AI US. "I wasn't going to be able to do the organizing if we were married."
Kirchner went on to co-found Stop AI, a group devoted to "protecting human life by achieving a permanent global ban on artificial superintelligence." Members moved into a one-room cottage in a rundown industrial Oakland neighborhood that some called "the barracks," sleeping in bunk beds and dedicating every waking hour to the cause. One recruit, Derek Allen, a 24-year-old computer programmer who graduated high school at 16, dropped out of college convinced AI-generated code would turn programming into a minimum-wage job.
The movement's doomsday fears are anchored in predictions from figures like Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate dubbed the "godfather of AI," who warns of a 10% to 20% chance AI will wipe out humans. Philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-author of "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All," has warned for years of AI's perils, invoking the "paper clip maximizer" thought experiment in which an AI ordered to make paper clips consumes all of Earth's resources to do so.
Violence and Security Threats Mount
Kirchner's disappearance is not an isolated incident. In April 2025, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots at the home of an Indianapolis city council member, leaving a note that read "no data centers." That same month, authorities arrested a 20-year-old Texas college student for an attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home in San Francisco, charging him with attempted murder and arson. The student was carrying an anti-AI document with a section on "our impending extinction," according to a federal criminal complaint. He has pleaded not guilty; his lawyers said his actions appeared driven by an "acute mental-health crisis."
About 200 protesters marched through San Francisco in a separate demonstration organized by Stop the AI Race, targeting offices of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind with demands to "stop the AI race." The group is advocating for a global agreement to pause AI development, including from China, with no new training runs of larger or more general frontier models.
OpenAI said in a statement that it is "committed to building AI that improves people's lives and embrace robust debate because it makes our research, products, and policies better and safer. But violent rhetoric and actions put people at risk and make it harder to have the conversation this moment needs."
Kirchner's comrades now say he never made any specific threats, adding they alerted authorities out of an abundance of caution. His friends hired a private investigator and hung fliers begging him to return. The last tip came in January 2026, when an OpenAI employee reported seeing him on a bus near the company's office. Hall rushed to the neighborhood and rode the bus for hours, looking at every face, but could not find Kirchner.
"I've thought about Sam probably every night, every day since he's disappeared, and I pray that he's OK," Hall said. "I pray about the issue of AI more generally, that humanity will choose the right path here."
For investors, the growing anti-AI backlash introduces a reputational and security risk that is difficult to quantify but increasingly impossible to ignore. Major AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind now face heightened security costs and potential regulatory scrutiny as activist tactics escalate. The movement's shift from street protests to more extreme actions could accelerate as doomsday rhetoric spreads among a small but committed fringe — a dynamic that history suggests rarely de-escalates without intervention.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
