On Tuesday, the OpenAI CEO was abruptly issued a subpoena while giving a talk in San Francisco with basketball coach Steve Kerr.
Footage of the incident, which took place at the Sydney Goldstein Theater, shows a man climb onto the stage and declare that he has a “subpoena for Sam Altman,” before being loudly booed by the crowd. Altman does not physically take the document, and the seeming intruder is ushered away.
“Wow, getting off to a dramatic start already,” quipped the talk’s moderator, Manny Yekutiel.
This was no prank. The man, it turned out, was an employee working for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, the agency confirmed to SFGate. And the subpoena was very much real.
“An investigator from the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office lawfully served a subpoena on Mr. Altman because he is a potential witness in a pending criminal case,” Valerie Ibarra, a spokesperson for the public law office, said in a statement provided to SFGATE. “Our investigators first made several prior attempts to serve the subpoena at Altman’s company headquarters and via its online portal.”
Following the public incident, an activist group called “Stop AI” claimed responsibility for the subpoena on social media. Some of the group’s members are on trial for their repeated attempts to block OpenAI employees from entering their headquarters, including during a widely covered demonstration in February, something the organization claims was a form of non-violent protest protected by law.
The subpoena orders that Altman appear at the trial, which Stop AI says has grave stakes. The group’s stated goal is to ban the development of an artificial superintelligence and save humanity from outright extinction.
“All of our non-violent actions against OpenAI were an attempt to slow OpenAI down in their attempted murder of everyone and every living thing on Earth,” Stop AI said in a statement. “This trial will be the first time in human history where a jury of normal people are asked about the extinction threat that AI poses to humanity.”
OpenAI has been the target of repeated protests. In July, a group of activists marched on Altman’s Bay Area home to protest his support of president Donald Trump and his “Big Beautiful Bill,” which enacted trillions of dollars in tax cuts and pulled billions of dollars of money away from social safety nets like food stamps.
Last November, a group of artists who were given early access to OpenAI’s video-generating AI Sora leaked the tool to the public, accusing the company of trying to use them as “PR puppets” to whitewash the company’s history of training its AI models on artists’ work without permission.
Stop AI may have a dramatic cause, but Altman himself has warned of AI’s apocalyptic risks.
He has frequently claimed that AI will destroy jobs, perhaps entire categories of them, and irreversibly disrupt society in ways ranging from causing a massive “fraud crisis,” increasing inequality, entrenching mass surveillance, and even result in humanity’s extinction.
