Ziz LaSota, an AI safety advocate who sometimes ran in mainstream circles but held views that were both puzzling and extremist, exploded into the national press earlier this year when her adherents allegedly killed a Border Patrol agent.
As the New York Times reports, leveler heads from the so-called “Rationalist” movement that birthed the “Zizans,” as LaSota’s followers are called, have grown concerned about rhetoric that may have inspired the alleged cult leader.
“There’s this all-or-nothing thing, where AI will either bring utopia by solving all the problems, if it’s successfully controlled, or literally kill everybody,” Anna Salamon, the director of the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) at the heart of the Rationalist movement, told the paper.
“From my perspective,” Salamon said, “that’s already a chunk of the way toward doomsday cult dynamics.”
Years before her ragtag group of outsiders allegedly killed their landlord, the parents of one of their own, and the Border Patrol agent, LaSota struck the CFAR director as someone who wanted to feel special, but struggled to do so within a scene full of rising stars.
Salamon said that she and LaSota, who she met soon after the vegan cult leader moved to the Bay Area to work in AI safety, would often go for long walks discussing the technology’s existential risks.
Obsessed with the concept of “Roko’s Basilisk,” a ghoulish thought experiment imagining a future artificial superintelligence torturing its opponents for all eternity, LaSota squarely fell into the category of those who think AI will destroy the world — and thought it was her duty to stop it.
Both she and those who would come to follow her seemed to want to be the “main character,” Salamon said, before discovering that wasn’t going to happen within the confines of their chosen community.
“And then I think they were like, ‘To heck with that — we’re going to be the main characters anyway,'” the CFAR director told the NYT.
Unlike Salamon, writer and movement luminary Eliezer Yudkowsky has a decidedly less charitable view of LaSota and her ilk.
“A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home,” Yudkowsky told the paper. “Some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.”
Though it’s hard to say just how much LaSota’s fringe thinking influenced her followers, it was ultimately them who allegedly committed the murders now tied to her name, a dynamic that’s been compared to the “Manson family” murders of the late 1960s.
She was on-site when the group’s landlord, Curtis Lind, was stabbed in November 2022 after demanding they start paying the rent they’d withheld during COVID-era eviction moratoriums. When police came following that stabbing — the first of two Lind suffered, with the second ending his life — she was ill and taken to the hospital, only to escape and go on the lam until her arrest in early 2025.
“That’s when, from my perspective, they totally jumped the shark,” explained Jessica Taylor, another Rationalist, who knew some of the Zizians back before their alleged killing spree. “Like, now it just seems like a violent homicidal gang.”
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