Understanding Anti-Technology Extremism

On July 27, the Program on Extremism at George Washington University hosted a webinar panel focused on anti-technology extremism, its evolution, how AI is reshaping the threat, and the policy implications. With a city councilman’s home being shot at after backing data centers, and the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman having a molotov cocktail thrown at his San Francisco home, this threat is actualizing across the United States, and even has international parallels. However, anti-technology sentiments which have led to violence are not new, but the advent of AI and its massive changes in society are leading to an evolution of this threat.

Featured panelists:

• Mauro Lubrano: is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Relations at the University of Bath. His research focuses on anti-technology politics, emerging threats, and innovation processes in terrorist organisations. He is the author of Stop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism.
• Dr. Yannick Veilleux-Lepage: is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Economics at the Royal Military College of Canada. His research examines terrorist innovation, the role of emerging technologies in violent extremism, and the evolution of far-right movements. He is the author of How Terror Evolves (2020) and the forthcoming Uniformed Threats, which explores right-wing extremism within NATO armed forces. Dr. Veilleux-Lepage leads the Canadian component of AMALTHEA, a Horizon Europe project on the gendered dimensions of radicalisation.

This discussion was moderated by Jordyn Abrams, Research Fellow at the Program on Extremism.  

On July 27, 2025, the Program on Extremism (PoE) at The George Washington University hosted a virtual panel discussion on anti-technology extremism, examining its historical roots, how the emergence of artificial intelligence is reshaping the threat, and the policy implications that follow. The event, moderated by PoE Research Fellow Jordyn Abrams, featured Mauro Lubrano, Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Bath and author of Stop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism, and Dr. Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, Associate Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada and author of How Terror Evolves. The panelists framed a threat beginning to actualize in the United States - a city councilman's home shot at after he backed data centers, a Molotov cocktail thrown at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's San Francisco residence - with parallels abroad.

The discussion began with Mauro Lubrano, who outlined the three strains of anti-technology extremism identified in his work: insurrectionist anarchists, who view technology both as a system spun out of control and as a tool wielded by economic, political, and technological elites to build a "prison society" of surveillance and control. Secondly, Eco extremists, who cast technology as the cosmic enemy of "wild nature" and adopt a nihilistic posture aimed not at revolution but at revenge. Finally, eco-fascists, who romanticize a lost union of nation and nature that modern technology has severed. Lubrano emphasized the ideological flexibility that unites them and identified four shared features: a view of technology as an interconnected system, referred to as the "mega machine," which includes the physical, ideological, and the human; a belief that technology poses an existential threat to humanity and the planet; an apocalyptic conviction that conditions will worsen; a common understanding that the fight must be an accelerationist and leaderless struggle that strikes strategically valuable infrastructure while rejecting hierarchy.

The conversation then turned to Dr. Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, who extended Lubrano's framework to grievances specific to AI. He identified nine such grievances across three clusters: economic ones, such as job displacement and wealth concentration; those tied to state and institutional power, including the weaponization of AI in military and policing systems; and those affecting the social and personal fabric, from loneliness to direct personal harm. Crucially, he argued that these grievances no longer stay within organized movements but surface across the ideological spectrum and among people with no ideological home at all. He offered two mechanisms to explain why such grievances accelerate toward violence: the "accountability gap," in which the absence of an identifiable party responsible for AI-driven harm relocates anger onto visible targets such as executives and public officials; and the "tempo problem," in which AI is deployed so quickly that neither individuals nor society have time to build resilience.

A central theme was distinguishing anti-technology extremism from legitimate activism. Lubrano stressed that the grievances underlying opposition to technology are often real, and that demands for transparency, accountability, and regulation must not be conflated with the small violent minority that seeks technology's eradication. Dr. Veilleux-Lepage located the dividing line firmly at violence, cautioning that treating all opposition as a security threat would close off political discourse, widen the accountability gap, and validate the very narrative of surveillance the ideology feeds on. Much of the discussion also centered on Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski, whose influence Lubrano compared to Marx's within communism. Dr. Veilleux-Lepage argued that Kaczynski's enduring legacy lies not in his doctrine but in his framework: that structural harm is politically actionable regardless of intent, that targets are legitimate for their role in sustaining the system, and that only revolution, not reform, can address the problem.

On the threat landscape, Lubrano described an environment of affinity groups and individuals rather than hierarchical organizations. Dr. Veilleux-Lepage drew on the "substitution effect" to warn that as CEOs harden their protection and data centers are secured, softer targets - AI researchers, conferences, and local officials - are more likely to be targeted. To counter the threat, Dr. Veilleux-Lepage argued regulation keeps grievances inside institutions rather than merely conceding to them, pointing to New York's data center moratorium as potentially good news, while Lubrano emphasized meaningfully including affected communities in planning processes, suggesting companies "build with, not next to” surrounding communities. Beyond communities, both agreed that increased communication with individuals working in industries threatened by AI is imperative. Looking ahead, Lubrano forecast a "silent escalation" of low-level violence that may never reach the headlines yet signals a persistent threat, while Dr. Veilleux-Lepage flagged the largely unexamined risk of insider threats within tech firms as the trend's most catastrophic potential trajectory.