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Guest Essay
Silicon Valley Needs to Notice That Molotov Cocktail
April 21, 2026,
11:00 a.m. ET
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Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
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By
Aaron Zamost
Mr. Zamost is a tech communications consultant and a former executive at Square.
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Lawless political violence landed on Silicon Valley’s doorstep this month when an attacker
hurled a Molotov cocktail
at the San Francisco compound of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive. The incident was a disturbing sign that simmering public anger about A.I. is spilling out of polling data and social media posts and into the real world.
The attack shook many tech employees, who in quiet conversations about safety wondered whether this was a watershed moment for the industry. I believe it should be — the whole thing is disturbing and jarring, but I’m hopeful it will change how some tech leaders deal with the societal consequences of their success.
Up until very recently, Americans viewed tech
more positively
than any other business sector. Now, I increasingly fear, tech is heading down the same path as health care, government and other institutions that Americans believe no longer serve them. A.I. may be accelerating this shift. We’re already seeing jobs replaced by technology that doesn’t fully work, deepfake pornography generated without consent, and digital communications overrun with fraud and scams. Seventy-seven percent of Americans believe
A.I. could pose a threat to humanity
— an idea Mr. Altman himself has advanced.
Yet the vast majority of Americans feel they have no say or recourse. Unlike essentially every other industry, tech has faced little to no accountability for its failures. No regulator has the power to recall a harmful software update. Boycotts don’t work for infrastructure such as cloud services (which store all your digital files), your email or your phone. When anger has no productive outlet, it takes only one unhinged person to turn it into something dangerous.
This lack of accountability is the model. Let’s start with Meta, which after several years of enormous investment pivoted away from its virtual reality namesake and stopped developing the metaverse. Imagine if General Motors decided the future of transportation was jet packs, rebranded itself as Copter, spent $80 billion on it, completely missed the electric-vehicle wave while its biggest competitors did not, then laid off 20 percent of the company. Does anyone believe G.M.’s chief executive would still have a job? Yet because his
“super-voting” shares
allow him to control the company board, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, remains in charge — despite championing one of the most expensive failures in corporate history.
Meanwhile, families are filing wrongful death claims against OpenAI, arguing its chatbot, ChatGPT, sent messages to their relatives that encouraged them to die by suicide. Roblox, an online platform that lets users (mostly children and teenagers) create and play their own games, faces numerous lawsuits from state governments that allege the platform has enabled child endangerment, sexual exploitation and grooming.
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