... Very few people had ever heard of Zizians until this January, when a US border patrol agent pulled over two young people, dressed in black, driving a Prius hybrid near the Vermont-Canada border. The ensuing shootout killed a federal officer. It also left one of the alleged shooters in custody and the other, a math prodigy who had formerly worked as a quant trader in New York, dead.

From there, the story grew stranger. Reporting by Open Vallejo and other outlets found that the Vermont pair had ties to a group of leftwing anarchists in California – including one who won an $11,000 prize for AI research in 2023 and was also arrested this January for allegedly murdering a landlord.

A few things drew those people together: all were militant vegans with a worldview that could be described as far-left. All were highly educated – or impressive autodidacts. Most were also, like Ziz, transgender. But what they had in common, above all, was a kinship with a philosophy, which Ziz largely promulgated, that takes abstract questions from AI research to extreme and selective conclusions.

In reporting this story, I obtained exclusive chatroom logs that chart the Zizians’ radicalization and ultimate acceleration into violence. I examined thousands of words of blogposts, court filings and other documents, and spent weeks interviewing people familiar with Ziz and her circle.

Ziz has not been charged in any killings. Yet acquaintances are unsettled, and former teachers frightened of their apostate pupil. Many sources requested anonymity due to safety concerns – “it’s just, you know … murder cult,” one person said – or a desire to speak freely about the rationalist and AI-risk communities.

How, exactly, did hyper-intelligent young altruists – who studied at Oxford, Waterloo and Rice, won academic prizes and research grants, and spoke sincerely of bettering the world – enter a trajectory that has ended with at least six people dead? What would cause a former spelling bee finalist to write in a chatroom discussion of having “dramatic fantasies about becoming a knife murderer” – and then, a year later, allegedly participate in an attempt to stab someone to death?

The answers lie in a strange saga of idealism and disenchantment: a violent collision of internet culture and the real world – and perhaps a harbinger of more uncanny tidings to come. Read more...