The suspect who threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house appeared in court today.

His hair was messy, dressed in orange prison clothes, sitting there with his head bowed. The judge asked him whether he agreed to postpone the formal indictment, and he softly said, “Yes.” Without bail, the next hearing is May 5.
After the court session, the defense attorney told the media, “In order to please a billionaire, the prosecutor turned a property-destruction case into an attempted murder that would put a vulnerable young person facing life imprisonment.”
The prosecutor responded: This was a targeted attack on Altman, with complete evidence.
This 20-year-old Texas boy usually works part-time at a pizza shop and attends community college. Last December, in a Discord group of an anti-AI organization, he wrote, “We’ve almost reached midnight—it’s time to truly act.” His online alias is Butlerian Jihadist—the name of the holy war in *Dune*, where humanity rebels against computers and thinking machines.
He traveled all the way from Texas to San Francisco specifically. At 3:45 a.m., a Molotov cocktail was thrown toward the iron-bar gate door of Altman’s house. Less than an hour later, he rushed to OpenAI’s headquarters and smashed the glass door with a chair. He had brought along more Molotov cocktails, a bucket of kerosene, and an assassination list with the names and residential addresses of multiple AI executives.
Within four days, Altman’s residence was attacked twice.
That morning, the day the incident occurred, Altman wrote on his blog, “I underestimated the power of language and narrative.” He said his anxiety about AI was “reasonable,” but hoped everyone would “have fewer literal and metaphorical explosions.”
This line was written a few hours after the Molotov cocktail fell.