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Police said the suspect targeted Altman’s San Francisco residence before dawn and fled the scene on foot.

A 20-year-old man has been arrested by San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman early on Friday morning.

Police in the United States said the suspect targeted the property at about 4am local time (11:00 GMT), allegedly throwing an improvised incendiary device that ignited part of an exterior gate before fleeing the scene on foot.

Authorities did not publicly identify the suspect or confirm the address where the attack took place.

Instead, in a post on the social media platform X, the police department said that a residence in the North Beach neighbourhood was affected.

However, a spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed the incident took place at Altman’s residence.

“Thankfully, no one was hurt. We deeply appreciate how quickly SFPD responded and the support from the city in helping keep our employees safe,” an OpenAI spokesperson said.

Police have not indicated a possible motive behind the attack. The suspect was ultimately located about an hour later near OpenAI’s headquarters, roughly 4.8 kilometres (three miles) away, where he was allegedly threatening to set the building on fire.

OpenAI said it is cooperating with law enforcement as the investigation continues.

Security concerns around OpenAI

The incident comes amid heightened security concerns around OpenAI’s offices, which have faced threats and protests in recent months.

Just last November, a man making violent threats to its San Francisco headquarters briefly prompted an office lockdown.

Altman and the company have increasingly become targets for activists who warn about the risks artificial intelligence could pose to society.

Critics have also raised alarm over OpenAI’s decision to collaborate with the US Department of Defense, a move that has intensified scrutiny of the company’s role in military technology.

Public sentiment towards AI remains mixed. A recent NBC News poll found that the technology is viewed even less favourably than US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal agency responsible for violent immigration raids under President Donald Trump.

Despite the criticism, OpenAI’s growth has accelerated rapidly. The company said last month it was valued at $852bn, following a major funding round that raised $122bn.

Companies like OpenAI, however, face lingering questions about whether they can generate sufficient revenue to cover their high expenses.

One of OpenAI’s signature products, ChatGPT, continues to dominate the consumer AI market, with more than 900 million weekly active users and about 50 million subscribers.

The company also said usage of its search features has tripled over the past year.

This is first big step by the ChatGPT maker to focus its business on potentially more lucrative areas, such as coding tools.

OpenAI is shutting down its social media app Sora, which went viral towards the end of last year as a place to share short-form videos generated by artificial intelligence but also raised alarms in Hollywood and elsewhere.

OpenAI said in a brief social media message on Tuesday that it was “saying goodbye to the Sora app” and that it would share more soon about how to preserve what users had already created on the app.

“What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing,” it said.

The company behind ChatGPT released Sora in September as an attempt to capture the attention, and potentially advertising dollars, that follow short-form videos on TikTok, YouTube or Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook.

But a growing chorus of advocacy groups, academics and experts expressed concerns about the dangers of letting people create AI videos on just about anything they can type into a prompt, leading to the proliferation of nonconsensual images and realistic deepfakes in a sea of less harmful “AI slop”.

OpenAI was forced to crack down on AI creations of public figures – among them, Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr and Mister Rogers – doing outlandish things, but only after an outcry from family estates and an actors’ union.

Disney, which made a deal with OpenAI last year to bring its characters to Sora, said in a statement on Tuesday that it respects “OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere”.

But Disney did not see the move coming, the Reuters news agency reported.

On Monday evening, Walt Disney and OpenAI teams were working together on a project linked to Sora. Just 30 minutes after the meeting, the Disney team was blindsided with word that OpenAI was dropping the tool altogether, a person familiar with the matter said.

OpenAI announced the move publicly on Tuesday.

“It was a big rug-pull,” according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss the matter.

Messy process

The move is the first big step by the ChatGPT maker to focus its business on potentially more lucrative areas, such as coding tools and corporate customers.

But the abrupt cancellation of Sora illustrates how messy the streamlining process may become as OpenAI prepares for a stock market debut that could come as early as later this year.

The Sora decision means the end of a blockbuster $1bn deal between Disney and the ChatGPT maker that was announced a little more than three months ago. As part of the three-year deal, Disney said it would invest $1bn in OpenAI and lend more than 200 of its iconic characters to be used in short, AI-generated videos.

But the transaction between the companies never closed, two other people familiar with the matter said, and no money changed hands.