“Will speaking about violence get me banned?” asked a member of the Stop AI Discord chatroom in the early evening of Dec. 8, 2025. His username was Butlerian Jihadist, a reference to a human rebellion against machines in Dune.
His post caught the attention of a producer working for a podcast called The Last Invention, which was documenting debates about artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical form of AI that could surpass human intelligence. The reporter messaged Butlerian Jihadist asking him what form of violence he had in mind.
“Luigi’ing some tech CEOs,” the user responded, referring to Luigi Mangione, who has been accused of killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. (Mangione has pleaded not guilty to all charges.)
Butlerian Jihadist was interviewed on the podcast soon after, in late January. His real name is Daniel Moreno-Gama, and he was a then-19-year-old Texan who believed Artificial intelligence could lead to the end of the human race. When journalist Andy Mills, the host of the podcast, asked Moreno-Gama if violence was on the table as a way to prevent this technology from taking hold, Moreno-Gama responded, “No comment.” Mills asked about his “Luigi’ing” remark he’d made earlier and he said that shouldn’t be taken too literally.
“So you don’t really think it would be wise for someone to, let’s say, kill [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman,” Mills asked.
“No, these people have unlimited resources — one person is not really going to do that much of a dent,” Moreno-Gama replied. “It’s almost all risk, no reward.”
Three months later, Moreno-Gama was arrested on accusations of throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s house, then driving to OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters with a jug of kerosene and threatening to burn the building down and kill anyone inside. Authorities say they found a document on him listing other AI companies as targets. (Moreno-Gama has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his lawyer requested a mental health evaluation.)
The Mechanics of Copycat Violence
Around the time of the Moreno-Gama incident, a 29-year-old man named Chamel Abdulkarim was arrested on charges of setting fire to a toilet paper warehouse in California. A witness told law enforcement that after the fire, which Abdulkarim allegedly started in protest of capitalism, Abdulkarim said “a lot of people are going to understand” and compared his actions to when “Luigi popped that motherfucker.” A month later, prosecutors claimed Jonathan Rinderknecht, who’s been accused of starting the Palisades fire, was fascinated by Mangione, searching for his name online along with terms like “kill all the billionaires,” according to court filings. Investigators also say he compared the arson to the United Healthcare CEO shooting.
While these crimes aren’t necessarily modeled after Mangione’s alleged actions, a suspect invoking Mangione is quick to garner media attention. And even when suspected criminals don’t mention Mangione at all, the press and the public often rush to connect their crimes or accuse young men of being copycats.
Sociologists and criminologists who study the effect of high-profile crimes say the reasons behind “copycatting” are nuanced. U.S. political violence is at a record high, and the way we react to violent acts is shifting. The glorification of criminals who attack the rich is not new — think Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger — and experts say this is often amplified in times of income inequity and economic turmoil.
The Digital Spectacle of Rage
“Many forms of popular culture present violence to us as a spectacle, something that we can enjoy without consequence,” says David Schmid, an English professor at the University at Buffalo, who researches Americans’ fascination with murder and true crime. “And in that respect, Luigi Mangione’s [alleged] shooting of [Thompson] is really, for many people, not that different from something that happens on the TV or in a movie or when they’re playing Grand Theft Auto. There’s not much reality to it.”
“Digital culture creates this opportunity to devalue human beings,” says Jacqueline Helfgott, a criminology professor and author of Copycat Crime: How Media, Technology, and Digital Culture Inspire Criminal Behavior and Violence. “That’s the harm that comes from all of this.”
A copycat crime is modeled after or inspired by a previous crime, fictional or real. There are many factors that can make crimes more likely to be mimicked, Helfgott explains: “Making crimes look fun, the attractiveness of the perpetrator, the degree to which the perpetrator and person who’s mimicking [them] are alike in some ways.”
“The copycat effect is the story that’s told about the violence, and the rationale for that violence resonating with people” Helfgott says. In Mangione’s case, she explains, some believe he was trying to “save people from harmful insurance companies.” Combined with the images of Mangione coming off of a helicopter on his way to a Manhattan courthouse — a perp walk that resembled a Marvel movie — Mangione’s arrest had a lot of the trademarks that would inspire people thinking about committing crimes.
“All of that stuff contributes to exacerbating the copycat effect because not only is the rationale for violence there, and he’s seen as some sort of modern-day Robin Hood,” Helfgott says. “He’s also this aesthetically-appealing individual that many people are idolizing. Everything about this case exacerbates the copycat effect.”