This article draws in part on reporting by the New York Times:
She Wanted to Save the World From A. I. Then the Killings Started. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/business/ziz-lasota-zizians-rationalists.html
1. The arrest that pulled a hidden world into view
(gpt/ajf) In July 2025 the sudden arrest of Ziz LaSota forced a corner of the internet into the headlines. For years the Rationalist community had been a self‑contained subculture of forums, arguments about AI and existential risk, and rented‑room meetups. That world is now being called to account after a string of violent incidents. What once looked like a niche intellectual project is, in the view of investigators, entangled with a trail of blood – and one of its most mercurial figures has become the focus of a criminal case.
2. Inside the Rationalist movement – origins and fault lines
Born on forums like LessWrong in the late 2000s, Rationalism began as a near‑utopian effort: use reason, probability and Bayesian logic to see clearly – and avoid catastrophe. Over time it built books, podcasts and research institutes, and drew a generation of Silicon Valley programmers who believed the world could be modeled and fixed. But clarity bred fractures. Some drifted into abstract speculation about AI doom; others turned rationality into a lifestyle of polyamory, nootropics and self‑experiments. What started as a method hardened into identity, complete with disputes over who had lost the plot. From these margins a few outliers spun away. One was Ziz LaSota.
3. Ziz LaSota – childhood, identity, rupture
Jack “Ziz” LaSota, born 1991 in Fairbanks, Alaska, was an intense, precocious child drawn to math, games and debate. As a teenager he found LessWrong, convinced that probabilistic reasoning could strip away human error. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering in 2013, interned at NASA, and briefly pursued graduate studies before dropping out. In his early twenties he transitioned and came to live as a trans woman – a decision that sharpened conflicts inside the scene. He/she accused CFAR and MIRI of marginalizing trans women and pushed further into radical experiments: unihemispheric sleep, the “debucketing” of all social categories, psychedelics as mental disruption. After protests at CFAR events he/she was banned, ignored and cut off. Those who knew him/her mark this as the point where she stopped arguing with the movement and began building her own.
4. How a fringe voice became the center of a cult
What followed was a gravitational pull. By the mid‑2020s LaSota had gathered a loose online circle drawn to her essays and (now) her refusal to brake. They called themselves “Zizians,” a label she disliked but that stuck. Her writing mixed technical AI worries with a fierce moral vision: time running out, institutions failing, every inherited limit to be torn down. Sleep deprivation, vegan asceticism, psychedelics and identity‑breaking rituals became badges of belonging. As she moved from critique to rejection of the Rationalist establishment, warnings of a cult of personality followed. By 2023 the split was complete: she was no longer a dissenter but the center of a sect.
5. The Valley connection – from AI dreams to tech‑bro fascination
The Bay Area amplified it. In cafés and co‑living spaces where Rationalism met the tech world, LaSota’s extremism acquired a strange allure. Some followers worked at major AI labs; others drifted through the gig economy, nights spent in Discord calls mixing technical speculation with confession. Her presence – half prophet, half provocateur – fit a culture that romanticizes rule‑breaking on the margins. To outsiders it looked like another Valley subculture; to insiders, a darker answer to a complacent elite.
6. Beliefs, methods, endgame
At the heart of the Zizians lies a stark premise: civilization is on a collision course with AI and almost no one is serious enough to stop it. Everything – experiments, manifestos, self‑destruction – serves that. Members frame their lives as training. Unihemispheric sleep blurs waking and dreaming, veganism disciplines, “debucketing” strips away categories they believe cloud perception. The goal is rupture, not reform: a core unbound by convention, able to think beyond “the human shell,” ready to act when the time comes. What that action means has always been vague – a mystique that, after a series of violent incidents, now reads as warning.
7. From online to offline – actions, deaths, investigation
Between 2022 and 2025, a series of violent incidents pulled the Zizians out of digital obscurity. In California, a landlord was fatally stabbed after a rent dispute with tenants linked to the group. In Pennsylvania, an elderly couple with ties to a former member were found murdered. And in Vermont, a traffic stop ended in a shootout that left a border patrol agent and a Zizian follower dead. Prosecutors see a pattern: growing defiance escalating into violence, with six deaths tied to the group across three states.
LaSota was arrested in February 2025 and remains in pretrial detention without bail. She faces charges including weapons possession, obstruction, and conspiracy. Her lawyers deny all allegations and claim she is being targeted for her beliefs. The trial, set for 2026, will test more than criminal liability. It will ask whether a fringe intellectual scene became a cult—and whether one person’s break with it ignited something far harder to contain.
To some, the Zizians recall one of America’s darkest cult legacies: the Manson Family. A charismatic outcast, an inner circle stripped of outside ties, and a doctrine that grows more urgent, more absolute, until violence no longer feels like a breach but a consequence. The comparison is not metaphorical. Like Manson, LaSota did not give direct orders—but shaped a system in which extremity became virtue and rupture became destiny. What began as a split from the Rationalist world now carries the weight of something far more volatile. The question is no longer what they think. It’s what happens next.
Footnotes
1. LessWrong: An online forum founded in 2009 by Eliezer Yudkowsky, focused on rational thinking, AI risk, and decision theory; regarded as the birthplace of the Rationalist movement. ↩
2. CFAR / MIRI: Center for Applied Rationality and Machine Intelligence Research Institute, two organizations that grew out of the Rationalist community. ↩
4. Unihemispheric sleep: A sleep pattern in which one hemisphere of the brain sleeps while the other stays awake. ↩
5. Bayesian thinking: A reasoning style based on Bayes’ theorem, updating beliefs as new evidence arrives. ↩
6. Debucketing: Deliberately breaking down mental “buckets” – categories such as gender, status or roles – to think outside fixed identities. ↩
7. Nootropics: Substances believed to enhance focus, memory or creativity. ↩
8. Alignment: Research aimed at aligning the goals and behavior of advanced AI systems with human values.