The Vanishing of an Anti-AI Activist

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:22)
On a Friday morning in November of 2025, a 911 dispatcher in San Francisco gets a tip about a potentially violent attack. The dispatcher immediately relays the information to local police. And they said that this is OpenAI. The person was coming here. They were making threats to kill people here. The dispatcher says that a man may be heading towards OpenAI's headquarters and that he's potentially armed.
Police officers rush to OpenAI.

**Wind Kaufman** (0:55)
Can we get some details about this?

**Matthew Hall** (0:57)
We're kind of going in black here.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:59)
Yeah, copy.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:00)
The cat is an X reference. The man the police are looking for is named Sam Kirchner. He's a founder of an anti-AI activist group called Stop AI. He's a white male, has some facial hair. Kirchner's photo is sent around to OpenAI employees, and the company locks down its campus.
Police officers search the area but can't find Kirchner.

**Zusha Ellinson** (1:27)
Sam Kirchner went missing that day, the same day that OpenAI went on lockdown. It's very unusual for a prominent activist just to go missing.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:40)
Yeah.

**Zusha Ellinson** (1:41)
And no one finds them.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:44)
Before he went missing, Kirchner had become more vocal in his hatred for AI companies. It became so alarming that his own friends in a stop AI protest group called the police on him.
Our colleague Zusha Ellinson covers extremism.

**Zusha Ellinson** (1:58)
Having covered activist movements, having covered law enforcement, having covered violence, I know that activist groups do not call the cops unless they think something is very wrong.

**Jessica Mendoza** (2:11)
Zusha's been looking into Kirchner's disappearance for months.

**Zusha Ellinson** (2:17)
I think it's important to look at people like Sam because depending on how the future unfolds with AI, we could see a lot of men in his same situation. And so I was interested to find out what had driven him to this movement to fight AI, and then what had pushed him over the edge.

**Jessica Mendoza** (2:37)
An OpenAI spokesman said that robust debate over AI makes their products better, but violent rhetoric and actions, quote, put people at risk and make it harder to have the conversation this moment needs. Today, we go inside StopAI to learn how their founders' disappearance has shaken the movement, and how the AI backlash has tech executives and employees fearing for their lives.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:24)
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**Jessica Mendoza** (4:59)
What is this group that Kirchner founded, Stop AI?

**Zusha Ellinson** (5:03)
So the barrier is ground zero for the AI industry, right? You have OpenAI, you have Anthropic. At the same time that these AI companies are drawing people who want to get jobs there, who want to get into the AI industry, the barrier is also drawing people who are opposed to this technology who worry about how it's going to impact society.

**Jessica Mendoza** (5:22)
The activists joining this anti-AI movement are concerned about job losses, data centers, and even the robot apocalypse.

**Zusha Ellinson** (5:31)
Sam Kirchner was one of those people. Stop AI was really on the most extreme end of these groups.