The people building AI now fear for their lives: companies are doubling security spending

The Wall Street Journal has described a trend that until recently would have seemed improbable: the people running artificial intelligence companies are starting to fear for their safety. Between late February and May 2026, threats against the sector's executives and data centers increased sevenfold. In early April a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the home of Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, and the man was charged with attempted murder; on 15 April an intruder walked into Anthropic's San Francisco headquarters to warn that an executive was "going to be killed."

The companies' response can be measured on the balance sheet. Palantir's executive protection spending rose 150% to nearly three million dollars in 2025, while Oracle's climbed 85% to 5.6 million, largely to protect founder Larry Ellison. Across the entire S&P 500, the share of tech companies disclosing such spending grew from 26.8% in 2021 to 38.1% last year: round-the-clock armed guards, protection extended to families, even instructions not to wear company-logo clothing.

At the root of it is mostly the fear of vanishing jobs. Alex Karp, Palantir's chief executive, put it bluntly: when people are told their jobs will disappear, they "reach for the pitchfork." To employment anxiety are added environmental concerns and, in some cases, genuine radicalization: one of the suspects was carrying a manifesto calling for the death of AI executives and investors.

It is striking that an industry so used to casting itself as an inevitable collective future must now hire bodyguards. Violence is never an answer, and there are no shades of grey on that point. But the armed escort is also a symptom of a social contract that was never really negotiated: a revolution was promised to everyone without asking anyone whether they wanted it, and now some are presenting the bill in the worst possible way. Protecting executives is legitimate; it might be wise to protect, with equal care, the trust of the people that AI is supposed to serve. — Olya