\n<\/p>\n
Updated at 7:13 p.m. ET on October 9, 2025<\/p>\n
The origin story of L.A.\u2019s Palisades Fire, according to a criminal complaint announced yesterday, reads like a scene from an art-house film. Shortly before midnight on New Year\u2019s Eve, a son of missionaries visits a scenic overlook near the Los Angeles coast. The clearing is known for the Buddha statues hikers leave behind in the hollowed-out stump of a power pole. The man listens to a French rap song about the malaise of modern life. Then, according to investigators, he starts a fire with an open flame, a combustible material, and malicious intent.<\/p>\n
He dials 911 to report the fire, but his first few calls do not connect (presumably because this is coastal Los Angeles, and our cell service is terrible). He then begins screen-recording on his cellphone while he continues to dial 911. He asks ChatGPT if he might be criminally liable for starting a fire with cigarettes, possibly to cover up what he\u2019s done. Then, the man films the flames on his iPhone as firefighters arrive.<\/p>\n
By January 2, they determine that the fire is out. But it has in fact gone underground, smoldering in the root system of the hillside\u2019s brush. Days later, strong winds travel from the desert to that same hillside and revive the blaze, which becomes the Palisades Fire. It levels more than 6,800 structures and kills 12 people. (Those structures included my childhood home, and those deaths included Arthur, a man who\u2019d lived next door to that old house and whom I\u2019d known and loved since I was born.)<\/p>\n
The suspect is a 29-year-old Florida man named Jonathan Rinderknecht, and the case against him is one that could be made only in an era of AI. To help establish intent, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives turned to Rinderknecht\u2019s conversations with ChatGPT\u2014not just his cigarette question, but also an exchange from months earlier in which he asked ChatGPT to generate an image of a \u201cburning forest\u201d next to a crowd of people \u201crunning away from the fire.\u201d OpenAI declined to specify whether the company had handed Rinderknecht\u2019s chat logs over to the investigators; a spokesperson for OpenAI told The Atlantic<\/em> only that \u201cfollowing the Palisades fire tragedy, we responded to standard law enforcement requests related to this individual.\u201d It was standard in the sense that tech companies comply with requests relating to criminal investigations all the time. But for an investigation to rely to this degree on a conversation with a large language model is new. The allure of a chatbot is that it\u2019s a machine that will process your most private thoughts without judgment. Now it seems that those conversations can appear before a judge and jury. (A public defender for Florida\u2019s Middle District told the Associated Press that the evidence against Rinderknecht is circumstantial; the public defender\u2019s office did not immediately return my request for comment.)<\/p>\n If the revelation about the fire\u2019s alleged beginning is meant to be the art-house film\u2019s dramatic conclusion, the Angelenos I\u2019ve talked with haven\u2019t exactly found it satisfying. \u201cI don\u2019t know a single person that\u2019s like, \u2018Did you hear the news? This is amazing,\u2019\u201d Jennifer Champion, who lost her home, her children\u2019s schools, and part of her husband\u2019s business in the fire, told me. Much of this story had already been told, albeit without such certainty: Since its early aftermath, residents suspected that the Palisades Fire was born out of the one on New Year\u2019s, which they also suspected was human-caused. (In L.A., rumor had it that some teens started it by launching fireworks.) The issue for locals was never really about how the fire started\u2014it was about whether Los Angeles and state agencies should have done more to make it less destructive.<\/p>\n The response to the Palisades Fire\u2014and the five others burning around Los Angeles County in early January\u2014was far from optimal. The Palisades\u2019 Santa Ynez Reservoir, which was specifically built for firefighting use, was empty. Many hydrants failed to dispense water. The emergency-alert system repeatedly failed. I was with my family in L.A. at the time, and received 11 evacuation alerts that, as far as I can tell, were all sent in error; in Altadena, some people did not receive a warning before the fire reached their neighborhood. Now residents are wondering why the fire department reportedly didn\u2019t station any engines in the Palisades on January 7, when the New Year\u2019s burn site was still relatively fresh and forecasters had predicted catastrophic, fire-fueling winds. Many Angelenos feel that they went without resources that should be standard during a wildfire. (The Los Angeles mayor\u2019s office directed me to the city\u2019s water-and-power authority, which did not respond to a request for comment, and the city attorney\u2019s office, which said it does not comment on pending litigation.)<\/p>\n A federal arson charge likely will not save state and city agencies from the civil lawsuits they are facing for negligence and mismanagement, because they generally concern government entities\u2019 fire preparation and response, not the Palisades Fire\u2019s acute origins. One suit, filed on behalf of more than 3,300 people affected by the Palisades Fire, alleges that the city and state didn\u2019t adequately clear public lands of brush, were slow to shut off power the day the Palisades Fire broke out, and allowed the reservoir to go dry. (The L.A. Department of Water and Power, which is named in the case, has previously denied any role in worsening the crisis. A spokesperson for the California Department of Parks and Recreation, which is listed as a defendant, said the office does not comment on pending litigation.) An arson conviction won\u2019t change those complaints, a lawyer representing residents in that case told reporters yesterday.<\/p>\n The acting U.S. attorney for California\u2019s central district, Bill Essayli, said at a press conference yesterday that he hopes the arrest \u201cwill provide a measure of justice to all those who are impacted.\u201d But most people I talked with met the news with just a resigned shrug\u2014not because they aren\u2019t grateful to law enforcement, but because it does little to change the experience of living in the aftermath of the fire. People have already lost what they lost. Champion still thinks about the letters from her late father that burned; my family still misses Arthur. Yesterday, after the press conference, I expected to feel some kind of justice for the man who helped raise me, or at least some kind of closure. Instead, I\u2019ve been combing through photographs of how his house used to look, how green his pepper trees were before they burned.<\/p>\n Matteo Wong contributed reporting<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Updated at 7:13 p.m. ET on October 9, 2025 The origin story of L.A.\u2019s Palisades Fire, according to a criminal complaint announced yesterday, reads like a scene from an art-house film. Shortly before midnight on New Year\u2019s Eve, a son of missionaries visits a scenic overlook near the Los Angeles coast. The clearing is known<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27146,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[5412,68,16234,1178],"class_list":{"0":"post-27145","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-fires","9":"tag-l-a","10":"tag-revelation","11":"tag-surreal"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}