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Fast-attack submarine USS California (SSN 781) moors pier side at Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton, Connecticut

The Wall Street Journal reports leading AI firms are hardening executive security as anti-AI sentiment turns physical, with some CEOs traveling under armed guard and others going quiet in public. Dakota Dominguez, an executive at Silicon Valley security firm JPT Security, told the paper tech CEOs did not need this kind of protection a few years ago and now budget for it routinely. The trigger was 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, who prosecutors say traveled from Texas to San Francisco with a Molotov cocktail, a handgun, and a manifesto warning of AI-driven extinction, then threw the firebomb at Sam Altman's Russian Hill gate before threatening to burn down OpenAI's headquarters. Around the same time, a man walked into Anthropic's offices behind an employee and told a guard an executive there was going to be killed.

JPT Security is not a neutral observer here. It is a vendor selling protection contracts to the exact class of client whose layoffs and displacement created the demand for those contracts. The same industry consolidating wealth through automation is now paying to insulate itself from the fallout, turning precarity into a second revenue stream.

Reporting on this same story found 43 percent of recent college graduates now underemployed even as Altman promotes a future of near-frictionless abundance. That gap between promised utopia and lived instability is the actual fuel, not a random spike in unhinged behavior.

My take: A security detail is a tell, not a shield, because it admits the model everyone is being sold has already failed the people underneath it. Bonnie Kate Wolf, a former Pinterest employee laid off in an AI restructuring, told the WSJ people are setting warehouses on fire because you can't go back to serfdom. She's right that kings historically don't keep their crowns, or their heads. The executives hiring guards aren't responding to random violence, they're responding to the predictable consequence of building an economy that treats mass layoffs as innovation and calls the backlash irrational.

Los Angeles area gangsters fighting for Assad in Syria, 2014