Attacks on Sam Altman’s Home: Arrests, Charges, and Timeline

The Molotov cocktail, and who threw it

Around 3:40 a.m. on Friday, April 10, 2026, a man threw a bottle containing a flaming rag at the metal gate of Sam Altman's home on Chestnut Street in San Francisco's Russian Hill neighborhood. Security guards on the property extinguished the fire before it spread. Less than an hour later, security staff at OpenAI's Mission Bay headquarters, about three miles away, encountered a person matching the suspect's description who made threatening statements about the building and was taken into custody. No one was hurt in either encounter. [1][2]

Federal and San Francisco prosecutors identified the suspect as Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, 20, of Spring, Texas, a suburb of Houston. According to a federal criminal complaint, he had traveled from Texas to San Francisco intending to kill Altman, and officials found a document on him identifying views opposed to artificial intelligence and to executives of AI companies, discussing AI's purported risk to humanity and what he called "our impending extinction." San Francisco police recovered incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, a lighter and the document at the scene. [3]

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins charged Moreno-Gama with two counts of attempted murder and attempted arson in state court, saying he tried to kill both Altman and a security guard at the property. Federal prosecutors separately charged him with possession of an unregistered firearm and damage and destruction of property by means of explosives. FBI Acting Special Agent in Charge Matt Cobo said the attack "was not spontaneous. This was planned, targeted and extremely serious," and U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said authorities would treat it as domestic terrorism. [3]

A second incident, two days later

Just after 1:40 a.m. on Sunday, April 12, a Honda sedan carrying two people stopped outside the same property, on its Lombard Street side, and the passenger fired a gunshot toward the house before the car fled. Security personnel reported hearing the shot, and surveillance footage captured the vehicle's license plate. Police traced the car and detained Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, without incident on the 2000 block of Taylor Street, booking them for negligent discharge of a firearm. A search of their residence turned up three additional firearms. No one was hurt. [2]

Atlas interpretation: The two incidents are separate cases with no reported connection between the suspects, filed three days apart against the same address. That is what makes the pairing notable on its own: not one attack but a short cluster, against a residence that had just added the kind of security detail visible in both police reports. [2][3]

Altman's response, and the wider debate

Hours after the first attack, Altman posted a photo of his husband and their toddler in a blog post addressing the threats, writing that he was sharing it "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 wrote that "the fear and anxiety about AI is justified," while calling for people to "de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally." [3]

Two advocacy groups focused on AI safety distanced themselves from the violence. The Future of Life Institute's president, Anthony Aguirre, said "violence and intimidation of any kind have no place in the conversation about the future of AI." PauseAI said the suspect had no role in the group but had joined its Discord server roughly two years earlier and posted around 34 messages there, none containing explicit calls to violence, one flagged internally as ambiguous. Discord said it banned Moreno-Gama for off-platform behavior. [3]

Atlas interpretation: Moreno-Gama's own writing described the act as advocacy rather than an isolated grievance, and both organizations he had contact with were quick to disclaim it. That combination, a document arguing for violence against AI executives generally and an attack aimed at one specific person, is the detail that separates this from an ordinary threat against a public figure. [3]