Shortly before 4 a.m. on Friday, April 10, a man in a dark hoodie approached the driveway gate of Sam Altman’s home in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood.
Surveillance cameras caught what happened next. He threw a lit Molotov cocktail-style incendiary device at the gate. A fire started. He fled on foot.
Less than an hour later, at approximately 5 a.m., the same man arrived at OpenAI’s headquarters in Mission Bay, roughly three miles from Altman’s house.
He grabbed a chair and struck the glass doors of the building with it. He said he wanted to burn it down and kill anyone inside.
Officers who responded recognized him as the same person from the earlier attack at Altman’s residence. They arrested him on the spot.
In his backpack he had additional incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, and a blue lighter. In his hotel room, which he had not returned to. A 9mm handgun.
No one was injured in either incident. That may be the only fortunate part of what the FBI described Monday as a planned, targeted, and extremely serious attack.
Who Is Daniel Moreno-Gama?
Daniel Moreno-Gama is 20 years old. He is from Spring, Texas, a suburb of Houston in The Woodlands area.
He was a former student at Lone Star College in Montgomery, Texas, authorities said Monday they cannot confirm he currently attends.
He had checked into a downtown San Francisco Union Square hotel on April 6, four days before the attack. Security footage shows him leaving his hotel room at 2:34 a.m. on the morning of the firebombing.
On social media, Moreno-Gama used the Instagram handle “butlerian_jihadist,” a reference to the Butlerian Jihad in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe, the fictional war in which humanity rose up to destroy all thinking machines.
He maintained a Substack account with writings arguing that artificial intelligence may lead to human extinction. He was also a member of the Discord server for PauseAI, a legitimate advocacy organization that calls for a pause on training the most powerful AI systems.
PauseAI banned him from the server after news of the attacks emerged, stating that “violence against anyone is antithetical to everything we stand for.”
The ideology, in other words, was not secret. It was documented, online, and consistent. What made Friday different was that Moreno-Gama apparently decided that writing about it was no longer sufficient.
Moreno-Gama’s Manifesto
When San Francisco police officers arrested Moreno-Gama outside OpenAI’s headquarters, they found a document on him.
Federal prosecutors described it as a three-part series. The first section was titled “Your Last Warning.”
That section advocated for the killing of CEOs of AI companies and their investors. It listed names and addresses of apparent board members, executives, and investors across the AI industry.
Authorities notified those individuals Monday as a precaution and said they do not currently see a specific threat against any of them.
The document discussed what Moreno-Gama described as AI’s purported risk to humanity and what he called “our impending extinction.”
The criminal complaint filed in federal court quoted lines from it directly. One read, “Also if I am going to advocate for others to kill and commit crimes, then I must lead by example and show that I am fully sincere in my message.”
Another line, also in the complaint, Moreno-Gama stated he “killed/attempted to kill” the victim, identified in court documents as Victim-1, publicly confirmed to be Altman.
The third section was a letter addressed directly to Altman. “If by some miracle you live,” it read, “then I would take this as a sign from the divine to redeem yourself.”
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins confirmed Monday that the document amounts to a manifesto, but said authorities would not release it publicly because doing so would further Moreno-Gama’s platform and stated intent to cause harm.
Moreno-Gama had also apparently emailed a version of the document to people at Lone Star College, his former school.
The FBI’s Matt Cobo, acting special agent in charge of the San Francisco field office, identified the college during Monday’s press conference.
The Charges
Moreno-Gama faces charges on two tracks, state and federal, and prosecutors are also actively evaluating whether the case should be treated as domestic terrorism.
At the state level, San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins filed two counts of attempted murder. The first is for the alleged attempt on Altman’s life. The second is for the security guard who was present at Altman’s residence the night of the attack.
Jenkins also filed two counts of attempted arson and multiple charges related to the creation and use of incendiary devices.
The state charges carry penalties ranging from 19 years to life in prison. The DA’s office said Monday it will move to hold Moreno-Gama without bail pending trial. He is scheduled to appear in state court Tuesday.
At the federal level, U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian for the Northern District of California charged Moreno-Gama with possession of an unregistered firearm, carrying up to 10 years, and attempted damage and destruction of property by means of explosives, carrying up to 20 years.
Federal court documents do not yet list an attorney for Moreno-Gama.
The domestic terrorism question is the one that Missakian flagged explicitly. “We are at the beginning of this investigation, but if the evidence shows that Mr. Moreno-Gama executed these attacks to change public policy or to coerce government or other officials, we will treat this as an act of domestic terrorism, and together with our partners, prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law,” he said.
The threshold for that designation, whether the attacks were designed to influence policy or coerce officials, is something investigators say they are actively working to determine.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche addressed the broader implications: “Violence cannot be the norm for expressing disagreement, be it with politics or a technology or any other matter.
These alleged actions, which damaged property and could well have taken lives, will be aggressively prosecuted.”
FBI Acting Special Agent Cobo was direct about how law enforcement views this:
“This was not spontaneous. This was planned, targeted and extremely serious. Acts targeting technology companies are not just local crimes, they have broader implications in economic security and public safety.”
The FBI Raid In Texas
Monday morning, FBI agents executed a court-authorized search at the Spring, Texas home believed to belong to Moreno-Gama’s parents. Agents spent several hours at the property in the residential neighborhood.
Neighbors, who described the homeowners as “very nice people” involved with their church, said the operation was quiet, no sirens, no apparent forced entry, agents simply present in large numbers.
FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed the operation on X:
“This morning, the FBI and partners conducted an operation in Texas, related to a subject in custody allegedly in connection with the attack on Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s home on Friday morning. Thank you to our agents, intel teams, and partners for the coordination.”
What investigators found inside the Spring home has not been publicly disclosed.
The Second Attack Over The Weekend
Sam Altman’s Russian Hill residence was also targeted in a separate, apparently unconnected incident two days after the Molotov cocktail attack.
At 1:40 a.m. Sunday, April 12, a Honda sedan with two occupants drove past the property, then circled back and stopped in front of it.
Gunfire was discharged. No one was hit. San Francisco police found the vehicle, executed a search warrant on Taylor Street, arrested two people, Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, both booked for negligent discharge of a firearm, and seized three firearms.
Investigators said Monday there is no evidence at this time connecting the Sunday shooting to Moreno-Gama or the Friday firebombing.
The two incidents appear to be unrelated. Altman’s home is now undergoing fence repairs.
What Was Sam Altman’s Response?
Altman posted on his personal blog Friday evening, after the attack. He shared a photo of his husband and their baby. “Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our house, no matter what they think about me.”
He acknowledged that criticism of AI comes from genuine concern. “I understand that criticism of AI comes from sincere concern about the incredibly high stakes of this technology,” he wrote. “We welcome a good faith debate.”
He then called for de-escalation:
“We should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally.”
OpenAI issued its own statement, writing, “To ensure society gets AI right, we need to work through the democratic process and a robust debating of ideas is an important part of a healthy democracy. We welcome a good faith debate. However, there is no place in our democracy for violence against anyone, regardless of the AI lab they work at or side of the debate they belong to.”
The Larger Context Of The Attacks On Altman
The attack landed in a moment of intense and growing public debate about artificial intelligence, who is building it, how fast, at whose expense, and to what end.
Groups like PauseAI represent a real and broadly held anxiety about the pace of AI development and its potential consequences. Their concern is legitimate. Their response to Friday was unambiguous.
What Moreno-Gama allegedly did is categorically different from advocacy, protest, or even the most confrontational legitimate expression of opposition to AI development.
He drove or flew from the Houston suburbs to San Francisco. He checked into a hotel four days before the attack. He wrote a manifesto naming names and addresses.
He titled the first section “Your Last Warning.” He packed incendiary devices and kerosene. He left his hotel at 2:34 a.m. and walked to the home of the man he had written about killing.
The distance between opposition to AI and what the federal complaint describes is not a gray area. It is the distance between a political belief and an attempt on someone’s life.
Moreno-Gama remains in San Francisco County Jail. He faces arraignment Tuesday. His lawyers have not yet appeared in either court proceeding. The investigation is ongoing.
