For years, the resistance to artificial intelligence looked manageable. There were academics writing open letters, Hollywood writers striking over contract language, the think-tank reports warning of job displacement. Tech executives nodded, pledged responsibility, and kept building as fast as they could.
Then someone threw a firebomb at Sam Altman’s house.
On Friday, a 20-year-old man named Daniel Moreno-Gama traveled from Spring, Texas, to San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood and allegedly hurled an incendiary device at the gate of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s $27 million home, igniting a fire at the exterior gate. No one was injured, but Moreno-Gama was arrested approximately an hour later outside OpenAI’s headquarters—where he was allegedly trying to shatter the building’s glass doors with a chair and threatening to burn the facility to the ground. He is now facing state charges of attempted murder and federal charges that could include domestic terrorism.
Those comments are ugly, but for those who’ve been paying attention to the anti-AI backlash buildup, they are not shocking at all.
Gallup’s own senior education researcher, Zach Hrynowski, blamed the bad vibes at least partially on the dwindling job market. The oldest Zoomers, he told Axios, are the angriest, as they are “acutely aware” of the ability of a technology to transform cultural norms without a second thought, unlike a Gen Xer who is trained to see new technology as toys and are still “playing around with AI.”
This is not just a Gen Z problem, either. In the American heartland, data centers are being proposed at a pace that local communities never anticipated and for which they were never asked permission, and they’re increasingly pushing back.
The concerns driving this resistance are less about existential AI risk and more about typical kitchen-table complaints; communities consistently cite higher utility bills, water consumption, noise, impacts on property values, and green space destruction as their primary objections. Water use is mentioned as a top concern in more than 40% of contested projects, according to a Heatmap Pro review of public records.
Meanwhile, Hanna noted, companies keep lording over the threat of AI replacing workers as “leverage.” She added, “Employers are making room for AI investments. They want to show that they can lay off people and do what they’re currently doing with a decrease in headcount.”
The backlash, Hanna argued, is not down to one thing. There are workers who feel threatened, consumers who thought more would come, and there are people who have had AI deployed against them in intimate ways. Lumping all of these together—with the fringe extinction-risk crowd, or the Stop AI protesters—misses what’s actually driving the force. “I think the vast majority of people who are angry at AI are regular consumers,” Hanna said. “People who were promised one thing, especially online, and they’re just getting a completely different experience.”
