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Time of India
07-07-2025
- Science
- Time of India
The Sith of Silicon Valley: Ziz LaSota's AI cult left six dead – who is she?
Once upon a time in the cold expanse of Alaska, a homeschooled child stared at the aurora borealis and wondered if the world was real. Years later, that same child – taller than most men, cloaked in black, calling herself Ziz – would terrify Silicon Valley's Rationalists, faking her own death, wielding a samurai sword, and leaving six bodies in her wake. This is the tale of Ziz LaSota, the transgender AI doomsday cultist who believed humanity would perish under artificial intelligence – unless she saved it first. Born under northern lights, reborn in the shadow of AI Ziz LaSota's early life was unremarkable: eldest of three, father a university instructor, homeschooled through lonely Alaskan winters. But teenage depression twisted her mind inward. Puberty felt like death. She wrote that she was 'horrified at being overwritten by a new self.' Logic became her religion. LessWrong and the Rationalist forums her sacred texts. At the University of Alaska, she read of 'x-risk' – existential risk – and decided AI was the harbinger of humanity's doom. She dropped out of graduate school and arrived in the Bay Area in 2016, ready to 'save the world.' But Silicon Valley is a cruel temple for prophets. She was just another zealot in a city full of them. The Sith emerges She became Ziz: more than six feet tall, blond curls tumbling past her black cape, declaring her faith in the Sith – the dark side order of Star Wars. She called Rationalists 'master Jedi.' The community tolerated her eccentricities. After all, they believed AI could destroy us all. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried – they had all passed through the Rationalist forge. But Ziz took it further. Her blog listed categories of people to be 'airlocked.' She advocated radical veganism, sleep deprivation rituals, and violent moral tests. She recruited a cadre of mostly transgender and nonbinary tech aspirants from Google, Oracle, NASA – they called themselves the Zizians. To them, Ziz was the messiah AI safety had awaited. From cult to killing field The timeline of blood is as absurd as it is tragic. 2019: Zizians don Guy Fawkes masks and robes to disrupt a Rationalist event in California. No guns were found, but SWAT stormed the venue. Arrests followed. Their chanting was described by police as 'speaking in tongues.' 2020: In Vallejo, California, landlord Curtis Lind was stabbed with knives and a samurai sword after demanding unpaid rent. He shot two Zizians in self-defence. One died. Ziz faked her death by falling off a boat, her obituary running in Alaska newspapers. 2023: The parents of Michelle Zajko, a close Zizian, were found shot dead in Pennsylvania. Bullets matched Zajko's gun, but evidence fell short. Ziz was arrested with them in a hotel, bailed out, and disappeared again. 2025: Lind was stabbed to death before he could testify against the group. Days later, in Vermont, two Zizians fired at Border Patrol agents. One agent and one Zizian died in the shootout. The philosophy that eats itself Rationalism always prided itself on logic untainted by emotion. But Ziz turned logic into madness. Roko's Basilisk, the infamous AI thought experiment predicting torture for those who don't create AI, haunted her. She believed any attempt to stop AI would condemn her to eternal torture by future malevolent superintelligences. Her solution: don't back down, escalate, airlock the doubters. Eliezer Yudkowsky, the Rationalist guru who warned of AI extinction, called Ziz's descent 'sad,' writing that weirdness attracted weirder people, some of whom turned out to be 'genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.' The Rationalist reckoning Today, Ziz sits in a Maryland jail, awaiting trial on gun, drug, and obstruction charges. She is not accused of wielding the murder weapons herself, but prosecutors say she orchestrated the violence. The Rationalist community is left with a bitter aftertaste. Was Ziz simply an unwell woman who found justification in AI apocalypse theory, or did Rationalism's own doomsday fetish birth her? Zvi Mowshowitz, a Rationalist blogger, asked if Ziz would have simply created another cult if AI philosophy hadn't ensnared her. 'The odds are, like, 55 percent,' he guessed. But perhaps the final lesson is simpler, as one Rationalist writer put it: even if the world is ending in five years, you cannot live like it is. That way lies madness, murder, and a black-caped prophetess clutching a samurai sword under flickering fluorescent lights.
New York Times
06-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
She Wanted to Save the World From A.I. Then the Killings Started.
If she didn't get access to vegan food, she might die. That's what Ziz LaSota told a judge in February when she appeared via videoconference in Allegany County District Court in Maryland for her bail hearing. Ziz, who is known widely by her first name, spoke haltingly in a weak voice, but interrupted the judge repeatedly. 'I might starve to death if you do not intervene,' she said, asking to be released on bail. 'It's more important than whatever this hearing is.' On its face, it seemed like a reasonable request. But prosecutors saw a ploy. They argued that Ziz, 34, was not just any inmate but the leader of an extremist group tied to a series of murders across the country. (The official charges against her involved trespassing, resisting arrest and a handful of misdemeanor gun charges.) She had skipped bail once before while being held in connection with a murder in Pennsylvania. Before that, she had faked her death to 'escape investigation' in a different case, according to the Maryland district attorney. Besides, according to Capt. Daniel Lasher, assistant administrator of the Allegany County Detention Center, Ziz had been served vegan meals 'from the get-go.' The judge denied her bail request. Ziz had been a minor celebrity within a slice of the Bay Area tech scene known as the Rationalists — a highly cerebral, extremely online group of tech and philosophy nerds dedicated to improving the world through logical thinking and deeply concerned with whether artificial intelligence will overtake the world and destroy humanity. Over the years, the Rationalist movement has counted Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried among its community, and has influenced numerous figures, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Steven Pinker and Nate Silver. Perhaps more significant, for the tech workers building the A.I. tools that will undergird our world, Rationalism is something like a fraternity, and a shared language. Ziz, who is transgender, started as a typical Rationalist — a geeky optimist hoping to save the world — but turned toward an ultraradical strain of the philosophy. She wrote favorably of violence, said she was willing to sacrifice everything to achieve her goals and considered A.I.'s threat to humanity 'the most important problem in the world,' she once wrote. Now six people are dead, landing her and several friends and allies, known as the 'Zizians,' in jail, awaiting trial. Many Rationalists worry that their community will be tinged by association with a group that, while not convicted of anything, has been compared in the press to the Manson family. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Vox
24-02-2025
- Politics
- Vox
They were Silicon Valley overachievers. Then they started killing.
Silicon Valley breeds visionary ideas, and with them, communities of dreamers. But not all those ideas and communities are benevolent. It can be hard to separate harmful movements from aspirational ones, but it's easy to exploit those who mistake one for the other. Throughout tech culture, this exploitation frequently generates dogmatic thinking and rigid adherence to a leader or idea — on the most extreme end, you have a group like the 'Zizians,' followers of a 'post-rationalist' leader named Ziz. The cultlike Zizians are allegedly responsible for a string of violence across the country: at least six confirmed deaths — three within the last month alone — two alleged suicides, and one disappearance. Just last week, Ziz and another group member were arrested in Maryland, charged with multiple minor offenses. Larger indictments seem likely to follow. Rationalism is a centuries-old philosophical belief that elevates reason over intuition or faith. Modern-day rationalists are often fixated on how we prepare for the Singularity — the moment when, in theory, AI will gain sentience — and it's in this sense that rationalism has profoundly influenced Silicon Valley. Rationalism takes a fundamentally optimistic, if limiting, approach toward human co-existence with AI. Post-rationalists, by contrast, tend to think an evil, world-destroying AI is inevitable. A post-rationalist leans into contrarianism, spiritualism, and preparing for the worst. This bleak cocktail has proved heady for the Zizians, encouraging them to embrace grandiose moral frameworks alongside self-destructive ideas like sleeping with half your brain. It's also led the group to a headline-making spree of bizarre crimes and murders, all with an elusive leader at the center. Ziz LaSota joined the rationalist community through its lodestar online forum LessWrong in 2012, when she was in her early 20s. She attended at least one workshop hosted by the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), a rationalist offshoot that some have accused of being cult-like itself, and which in 2014 faced backlash as part of unproven, anonymous child sex-trafficking allegations against its parent group, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). In 2016, Ziz moved to the Bay Area from Alaska and gathered a small community to live on boats in the San Francisco Bay to avoid paying rent. The boats were short-lived; the community — most of whom were vegan and trans like Ziz — and what grew out of it, persists in some form to this day. She soon started a niche but attention-getting blog (since deleted but mirrored here) where she divided people into categories like 'living,' 'vampire,' and 'zombie.' She was obsessed with willpower, seemed to view psychopathy as liberational and aspirational, and claimed mind control. 'Sometimes cops harass me for wearing my religious attire as a Sith,' she wrote, referring to wielders of the dark Force in Star Wars. On her blog, Ziz peddled 'unihemispheric sleep' (UHS), a real but very unhealthy practice in which people attempt to rest only one half of their brain at a time. Sleep deprivation is a tactic religious cults have long used to render their followers psychologically vulnerable; in this case, it tied into Ziz's theory that the left and right brain separated people into two different identities. According to Ziz, humans could exist as two entirely different people, even entirely separate genders with different states of awareness and capacities. (This is very similar to the TV show Severance and a lot like the 'two wolves' meme brought to life.) Ziz claimed that these divided inner selves had different cores that were either 'good' or 'nongood.' The likelihood of a person's two cores both being good, or 'double good,' was infinitesimal. Naturally, she herself was double good. In her comment section, people now seriously debated the merits of Ziz's ideas. Some had taken workshops through CFAR, but often directed negative attention their way now. Many commenters were highly educated and working in tech; one was building future-prediction apps and algorithms. You might not think this sounds rooted in rationalism at all — or even post-rationalism, with its renewed interest in intuition and 'woo stuff.' But in fact, modern-day rationalism cultivates all types of wild thinking. On top of having been popularized in its current incarnation through a Harry Potter fanfic, the belief system abounds with fantastical thought experiments, like Roko's Basilisk — in which a vengeful future AI punishes those who did not help to create it. Ziz frequently extrapolated these lines of thinking, weaponizing them into potentially dangerous mindsets. 'Zizians do not think it is ever valid to surrender,' one pseudonymous ex-Zizian wrote. 'Giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender.' By 2019, Ziz and a handful of her acolytes had transitioned from houseboats to living in an RV lot in Vallejo, another city in the Bay Area, owned by an elderly landlord named Curtis Lind. A nebulous cluster of dedicated followers who had found her through her blog continued to interact with her and the other community members online. That year, Ziz began claiming that the allegations against MIRI were true and that higher-ups had been blackmailed into a payout. This all led to Ziz shutting down a CFAR alumni reunion in Occidental, California, 'to protest the coverup of child molestation' by CFAR attendants, according to court documents. Ziz and followers showed up to the retreat wearing robes and Anonymous-style masks and blocked the entrance. A SWAT team later detained them amid disputed reports that protesters were armed. These arrests, and the stacked charges that accompanied them, opened a new chapter — one in which her followers drowned in attorneys' fees and she dodged court hearings as her notoriety spread. By this point, rationalists had begun posting warnings to the community, describing Ziz as dangerous and cult leader-like and referring to her followers as 'Zizians.' The growing perception that her influence was toxic may have been boosted by the deaths of former members, including Maia Pasek, who allegedly died by suicide in 2018 while intensely practicing UHS. Ziz later wrote a long blog post alleging that Pasek was 'nongood' and had been performing UHS incorrectly. Then there was Jay Winterford, an ex-Zizian who rounded-up testimonials against Ziz. Winterford died in 2021, reportedly by suicide, after which Ziz wrote a comment generally believed to be about Winterford, saying she had spent '7 months, most of every day in a desperate (and mutual) mental battle, of trying to get in [Winterford's] head.' Ziz also allegedly weaponized her own followers. A follower named Jamie Zajko appeared to claim that Ziz had pressured her for weeks to murder another ex-Zizian. 'I'm writing this, so if Alice and I die or vanish, everyone knows who is responsible,' Zajko wrote. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the Vallejo Zizians allegedly stopped paying rent. (Ziz later wrote that paying rent was 'bad praxis.') Lind began a years-long eviction process, during which the Zizians allegedly took over the property. Meanwhile, Ziz skipped court. In August 2022, lawyers representing Ziz and a long-time follower named Gwen Danielson in a countersuit over the CFAR incident filed motions claiming Ziz had died after falling overboard earlier that month, and that Danielson was believed to have died by suicide (though prosecutors were skeptical). Ziz's obituary was released under her birth name. She wouldn't remain dead for long. In the wee hours of November 13, 2022, the dispute between Lind and his Vallejo tenants erupted. The Zizians were due to be evicted in two days, and claimed Lind had been harassing them. According to a friend of Lind's, several tenants lured him outside his home. Those present included Zizians Suri Dao, Somni Leatham, and Emma Borhanian. A prosecutor later claimed Ziz was also there, 'alive and well.' In one version, when Lind stepped outside, the tenants attacked. In another, Lind started shooting, unprovoked. What's undisputed is that someone stabbed Lind repeatedly with a samurai sword, ultimately blinding him in one eye, and that he also shot two of the tenants, seriously injuring Leatham and fatally shooting Borhanian. Police charged Dao and Leatham with the murder of their friend and Lind's attempted murder; they're still in detention and have each repeatedly attempted to escape. On the other side of the country, Jamie Zajko — the follower Ziz had allegedly pressured to commit murder — was also facing police scrutiny. In early January 2023, her parents, Rita and Richard Zajko, were shot to death in their home in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania, around the same time as an argument during which neighbors' surveillance allegedly captured screams of 'Mom!' Police interviewed Jamie Zajko's roommate, a man named Daniel Blank, in connection to the crime. Shortly after, Ziz was found hiding in a hotel with Blank and Zajko and detained on a $500,000 bail in connection with obstruction and disorderly conduct charges, but then released. Police failed to find enough evidence to bring indictments against any of the trio. By this point, the group was in disarray. One Zizian, Borhanian, was dead; one, Zajko, was on the lam; and two more were missing. Blank had dropped out of contact with friends; his profile was uploaded to the national missing persons database in 2023. Danielson had allegedly faked her death, but she, too, had fallen off the public radar around the same time as Blank. The last known contact with her was reportedly with family over the holidays in 2024; her father told the San Francisco Chronicle that she broke away from the group and went into hiding, and he fears for her safety. Meanwhile, Dao and Leatham were still in detention, their trial still looming. Because evidence was scarce, Lind's testimony at trial would be vital to the case. Enter three more Zizians living in the same neighborhood in North Carolina — a genderfluid woman named Teresa Youngblut, who also went by Milo; their partner Maximilian Snyder, who also went by Audere; and Ophelia Bauckholt, who moved to the US from Germany around the time of the Zajko murders. Like many in the group, they were highly intelligent: Snyder studied philosophy at the University of Oxford while Bauckholt was a successful Wall Street stock trader. (Zajko has a degree in bioinformatics and had been a research intern at a Philadelphia hospital studying, ironically, sleep deprivation.) Over several days in early January 2025, witnesses noticed a person in all black looming around Lind's Vallejo residence. On January 17, Lind was killed. Snyder was arrested on January 24 and charged with the murder in a stabbing death, with the criminal complaint alleging Lind was killed to prevent him from testifying. Shortly before Lind's death, Youngblut and Bauckholt traveled to Vermont. The pair drew attention by dressing in all black and carrying a handgun. (Officials believe Zajko, still dodging authorities, gave them firearms she'd purchased the year before.) Authorities reportedly surveilled the duo for days as they visited Newport, Vermont, and looked at property in the area. Finally, on January 20, things came to a head: Approached by a border agent named David Maland, Youngblut allegedly pointed a Glock at him and fired it at least twice. In the ensuing shootout, Youngblut was shot, and both Maland and Bauckholt were killed. Authorities later described finding a weapons cache in the car the pair were driving, as well as '48 rounds of .380-calibre jacketed hollow point bullets, a ballistic helmet, and night vision equipment.' Youngblut was promptly arrested and is facing federal charges. On February 16, Ziz, Zajko, and Blank were all apprehended by authorities in Maryland. The trio were arrested on charges including trespassing and obstructing law enforcement. Blank's arrest marked the first time he had been located since being reported missing, according to a lawyer at a pretrial hearing in which all three were detained without bail. Ziz told the judge, 'I haven't done anything wrong.' The death toll seemingly associated with Ziz and her followers now stands at six. It might seem that Ziz masterminded all this mayhem, but it's unclear how much direct involvement she had. Is this, as the Daily Mail has proclaimed, a 'trans death cult'? Are the Zizians simply loosely connected murderous individuals? Something in-between? 'There's no organization, there's no centralization. It's not like we all have Ziz on speed-dial and ask her what to do every day,' a Zizian called Octavia Nouzen said in an interview she gave to a podcaster who goes by Uncle Kenny, who has extensively investigated the Zizians. 'It doesn't take a mysterious cult leader with infohazards and brainwashing and all this spooky stuff to make these bad things happen — there's other contingent circumstances.' The Zizians are far from the only extremist thought community that's embedded itself within tech culture. One major factor in the Zizian radicalization seems to be the way rationalism and post-rationalism encourage adherents to adopt ever more arcane, fantasy-infused worldviews which can easily turn dangerous. 'At the time, my left hemisphere was a revenant and my right hemisphere a lich; and yeah my phylactery shattered, but what ended up happening was that part of me started fading towards zombiedom for many months, before rebuilding a phylactery and restoring lichdom,' goes a typical comment on Ziz's blog; this one happens to be from Danielson before she disappeared. In the middle of a passionate defense of the Vallejo tenants, one supporter breaks away to invoke the modern rationalist ur-text Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality , declaring, 'You know that scene from HPMOR where Harry does everything he can to save Hermione, but she dies anyway? This was like that, but so much worse because it really happened.' The Zizians are far from the only extremist thought community that's embedded itself within tech culture; some are arguably even influencing high-level decisions that are being made about humanity's near- and long-term future. We have yet to fully grapple with the darker implications of this much obscure ideology impacting our societal development, as well as the immediate effects at an individual level. It's heartbreaking to read Maia Pasek's alleged suicide note and see her using the framework of rationalist decision theory to posit her own existence as a question of simple logic or non-logic. And then, of course, there are the murders. There's no knowing if, how, or why, Ziz might be orchestrating this cacophony of death. While her acolytes keep roleplaying epic battles between good and evil, alive and undead, humans and basilisks, it's only rational to think like Ziz herself: The worst may be yet to come. See More: Culture Internet Culture True crime
