The A.I. Party House Where Networking Has a Dark Side

The eight-bedroom Mediterranean-style mansion, which borders a golf course in the wealthy Silicon Valley town of Hillsborough, Calif., has gone through a lot in recent years.A car flew through the air at one party on its grounds.At another event, titled “Midnight in Paris,” guests arrived in horse-drawn carriages to a replica of the Eiffel Tower.

Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, has given talks at the home.And Claire Boucher, the singer-songwriter known as Grimes and the onetime partner to Elon Musk, has performed there.The mansion is one of the most prominent — and notorious — tech group homes, which have proliferated across Silicon Valley and San Francisco amid the artificial intelligence boom.

Long gone are the fraternity-style rental homes popularized by Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook, where grungy engineers coded all day and crammed into shared rooms at night.Today these so-called hacker houses are driven by missions, like the advancement of humanity, and have become critical nodes for the A.I.industry.

Residents are often start-up founders or engineers working at OpenAI or Anthropic.Rent can hit $10,000 a month for a room.But what has unfolded in them has sometimes gone far beyond socializing and networking.

Some houses have become the sites for sexual harassment cases and rape allegations, as well as infighting among residents, according to previously unreported police reports obtained by The New York Times, court records and more than 20 people in the A.I.industry.Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said.

One house threw lavish events for the A.I.community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation....