The AI Backlash Has Turned Violent. And It's Still the Technology's Early Days. -- Barrons.com

By Martin Baccardax

If chatbots were as all-knowing as we've been led to believe, they should have seen the backlash to AI coming. Because come it has.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, perhaps the most-recognizable face attached to the AI revolution, was the target of a Molotov cocktail attack on his home in San Francisco late last week, police confirmed. A second attack allegedly took place on Sunday.

No injuries were reported, but Altman was clearly shaken as he discussed the attack in a blog post shortly after the Friday incident.

"I empathize with anti-technology sentiments and clearly technology isn't always good for everyone," he wrote. "While we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally."

Incendiary is certainly a word one could use to describe public sentiment toward AI, which has barged into public life with a pace and aggression unlike any of its technological predecessors.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, launched in October of 2022, reached 100 million users by the following January, making it the fastest-growing app of all time.

Rival agents, newly-developed models, and cut-priced upstarts from China have only increased the pace of growth, while new companies like Anthropic have taken only months to earn valuations that legacy names like General Electric needed decades to amass.

The disruption has destroyed value, as well, with software giants losing billions in market capital, and mega cap tech titans like Microsoft suffering historic share price declines for failing to keep pace with the new revolution.

And the story isn't much better for consumers.

AI might be the Holy Grail of technology buffs, but it's a poisoned chalice for the job market. Economists see massive cuts, fewer workers and increasingly automated industries from the trillions in investment spending expected over the next few years.

But the bad news doesn't stop there. American workers are paying for the privilege of being put out of a job in the form of higher energy bills, tax breaks for tech companies and stock market concentration risks in their retirement savings plans.

All with the full-throated support of government officials, who seem far more intent on prosecuting the transgressions of social media than putting guardrails on a new technology that will not only transform the global economy, but put swaths of it at risk at the same time.

And while companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta Platforms, and others attempt to outbid one another with statements determining the power of their proprietary technology, those risks only grow larger.

The fight for new capital saps investment from other sectors, while meeting increasingly grandiose ambitions requires more computing power, which in turn demands more energy, which stokes energy price increases, and so on.

It also puts AI at the center of global commerce, whether consumers like it or not. Dealing with a call center or an automated teller might have been exasperating. Navigating a transaction where no human will ever intervene is quite another.

And it's not as if we think it's terribly accurate, either.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll suggested that while more than half of Americans surveyed use AI for research, only 21% believe it's mostly providing accurate information.

"Americans are clearly adopting AI, but they are doing so with deep hesitation, not deep trust," said Chetan Jaiswal, associate chair at Quinnipiac's department of computing.

If Bitcoin, the world's biggest digital currency, is a solution in search of a problem, then AI is a solution in search of a solution. What it can do is breathtaking, but what it can destroy is equally extraordinary.

And unless and until the people paying for the technology, both directly and by extension, are convinced of its merits, concern about the latter will continue to outweigh admiration for the former.

But AI should know that already.

Write to Martin Baccardax at martin.baccardax@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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April 14, 2026 11:15 ET (15:15 GMT)

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