A Texas man has been charged after allegedly traveling to San Francisco with the explicit intent to kill OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and burn down the company's headquarters. He reportedly carried a written document titled "Your Last Warning" and firebombed Altman's San Francisco home.

Let's be unambiguous about this: regardless of how you feel about artificial intelligence, Sam Altman, or the growing wealth gap in America, showing up at someone's house with a Molotov cocktail and a kill list is terrorism. Full stop.

We say this because the online reaction has been... complicated. There's a surprisingly large contingent that seems more interested in cracking jokes or offering sociological explanations than condemning attempted murder. As one SF resident put it, "Desperate people will do desperate things. The gap is widening. I have no idea if we're going to be able to turn things around before they really start to tank." That's a real observation about economic anxiety — but it cannot double as justification.

You can hold two ideas in your head simultaneously: that Big Tech consolidation of power deserves serious scrutiny, and that firebombing a residential neighborhood is an unacceptable danger to everyone who lives there. Altman's neighbors didn't sign up for this. The people walking their dogs on that street didn't sign up for this.

From a public safety perspective, this should concern every San Franciscan. If a man can travel across state lines with a stated intent to commit murder and arson, and actually execute part of that plan, we need to ask hard questions about threat assessment and law enforcement response. This wasn't a spontaneous crime of passion — it was premeditated, documented, and carried out in a residential area.

San Francisco has spent years trying to shake its reputation as a city that can't keep its residents safe. Incidents like this don't help. And the quasi-sympathetic response from corners of the internet — treating political violence as an understandable byproduct of inequality — is a dangerous road that leads nowhere good.

Criticize OpenAI's business practices. Protest outside their offices. Vote for candidates who'll regulate AI. Write angry op-eds. All fair game. But the moment you pick up an incendiary device, you've lost any claim to moral high ground — and you've made the rest of us less safe.