The eight-bedroom Mediterranean-style mansion, which borders a golf course in the wealthy Silicon Valley town of Hillsborough, California, 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 AI industry. Residents are often startup 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 AI industry.

Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said. One house threw lavish events for the AI community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation.

At the mansion in Hillsborough known as AGI House — named for “artificial general intelligence,” a technology that can match the powers of the human mind — local police have logged 37 incidents since 2022. At least 17 were related to complaints about large parties and events, according to the reports.

The others included an episode in December when a woman called police and told them that a male AGI House resident had pressured her to have sex; she climbed over a gate to escape. Last year, police were also asked at least four times to perform welfare checks, which typically happen when people experience mental health issues or are considered unsafe to themselves or others.

“He is making no sense at all,” a caller told police about an AGI House resident in November.

Many group houses — the Times identified at least 10, with plenty of others operating quietly — are run by tech executives who see an opportunity to earn profits by creating gathering places. They host events day and night, attracting young people with the promise of connections. At some houses, there are waitlists more than 40 people deep for each room.

Some of the industry’s biggest names are involved. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has advised the Residency, which aims to be a global network of hacker houses for “ambitious builders” to live and work.

“We believe in the potential of young people to build a more abundant, innovative and peaceful future,” its website said.

Sofie Bukovska, 26, who works at the AI film production company Trippy Pictures, moved into AGI House last year for a few months and said she had quickly realized how helpful it was to her career. She met AI executives and personalities, including Grimes, whom she probably wouldn’t have otherwise, she said.

The atmosphere “was something very different from normal life,” Bukovska said.

Rocky Yu, a venture capitalist who has managed AGI House since 2023, has tried curbing the partying, he has claimed in court documents. Reached by phone, he said he was not aware of any police reports and declined to answer questions.

The mansion, which is connected to a venture capital fund, is backed by Eric Schmidt, a former Google CEO, and Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist, according to its website. A representative for Andreessen said he was not involved.

The 18,000-square-foot property has become such a center of gravity for the AI industry that Yu and a former manager are embroiled in a court battle over who owns the rights to the AGI House brand. The home has become emblematic of the behind-the-scenes issues — often not publicly discussed — that group houses face.

‘An Epic Experiment’

AGI House’s roots trace back to Jeremy Nixon, 33, a former Google researcher who established other tech group homes before the AI boom. One that he cofounded around 2019 at a five-bedroom house in San Francisco was called Genesis.

Genesis was “an oasis for founders and dreamers,” according to its website, offering “a dynamic and inclusive environment that promotes personal and professional growth.”

The house quickly became a hub for events. Eric Zhu, 19, a tech entrepreneur, said he used to sneak into parties there when he was about 13. No one checked anyone’s age, he said, and “it was pretty crazy.”

Yehong Zhu, 30, who is not related to Eric Zhu, filed a police report accusing a former Genesis house member of rape and assault in December 2021, according to a copy of the report. She has lived in four tech houses and initially viewed them almost as utopias where she could quickly meet other entrepreneurs, she said, before seeing a darker side.

Yehong Zhu’s case remains under investigation. The Genesis resident she accused has left the house and cannot be located, she said.

“I’m far from the only one this has happened to,” said Zhu, the founder of an AI startup called Zette.

Nixon flouted the lease terms for the home by letting a string of people come and go, according to his former landlord, Mei Chiao. Genesis ended around 2021, with Nixon and his roommates leaving behind more than $60,000 of damage, Chiao said. In 2023, she sued Nixon and another Genesis house manager in San Francisco Superior Court for more than $9,000 in unpaid rent, recouping about $5,000, according to court records and Chiao.

“It was a nightmare for me,” Chiao said. Nixon declined to comment.

In 2022, Nixon rented a mansion in Hillsborough to create a new tech community, NeoGenesis, with Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder, court records show. Karpathy said in an email that he had paid “a chunk of the rent” during the house’s first year and attended a few events, but had not visited for years.

Nixon wanted NeoGenesis to be “a community house and space for some of the most exceptional founders, researchers, scientists and technologists,” according to court documents. It would be “an epic experiment,” he wrote.

Unlike other group houses where rent was cheap, NeoGenesis residents paid up to $10,000 a month for a room, people who lived there said.

Many were there for the connections. Nixon threw lavish events, including the “Midnight in Paris” party and an event honoring the future with the flying car. A-list techies including Brin sometimes showed up.

With little parking, event attendees often left their cars all over town. Music sometimes blasted all day and night. Neighbors complained to the Hillsborough police and other town officials, police and court records show.

After OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, Nixon said, he hatched the idea to rebrand NeoGenesis as AGI House, according to a lawsuit he filed last year in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Yu, the current manager.

Nixon said he planned to make AGI House even bigger. His concept involved “20 AI hackers, living in the same epic house for three months, 20 weekend hackathons, daily dinners with AI royalty, ship code again and again and again,” according to Nixon’s notes, which were released in court.

“This is a new golden age,” Nixon said, according to the court documents.

Yu, 43, a venture capitalist, contended in his own lawsuit last year that he had birthed the AGI House concept. Nixon could not keep up with house payments for NeoGenesis or with complaints from the town, said Yu, who took over the home.

Mermaids in the Pool

NeoGenesis was rebranded as AGI House in 2023, with Yu as the manager, according to court records.

Nixon returned to San Francisco, opening another group home in 2024, called AGI House SF, according to court records. The seven-bedroom property calls its residents “the PayPal Mafia of AI,” referring to the group of influential founders, including Peter Thiel and Musk, who helped found the payments company. AGI House SF’s residents have founded 13 companies valued at more than $1 billion, according to its website.

At AGI House in Hillsborough, Yu hired a manager to oversee residents and formed a venture capital firm, AGI House Ventures. He enticed Anthropic and OpenAI to co-host hackathons at the mansion and invited top executives to sponsor events, Yu said in court documents.

As the home’s profile rose, the police logged at least eight incidents there in 2023 and 2024 related to noise and crowding of residential streets. In November 2023, Hillsborough’s city manager sent a cease-and-desist letter to Yu warning him that his parties put him in danger of violating the town codes restricting commercial activity.

“Your events have become much more frequent, often several per week,” the letter said.

Less than 2 miles away, Hillsborough officials were dealing with another party house for the AI industry: a 6,000-square-foot home run by Jimmy Chen, who goes by the social media handle “Spice King of Zanzibar.”

Chen threw elaborate functions, including one event where women waded into the pool dressed as mermaids. Another party had a jungle theme that included a wall painted with a Mayan mural, according to police records and attendees.

More than 20 complaints about the house were recorded by the police between late 2021 and 2024, mostly related to noise and parking. One report also noted a “possible kidnapping”; another said Chen had been beaten up at an event.

By last year, Chen had moved out and the house was destroyed, the landlord, Lena Chedid, claimed in a police report. The crystals adorning a chandelier had been replaced by plastic ones, the report said, with soundproof panels installed everywhere and light bulbs painted in different colors “depending on tenants’ party theme.”

“A professional company needed to spray the entire house as it was found to be infested with rodents,” Chedid wrote in the report. She declined to comment.

Chen said that his landlord had been aware the house was used for events and that he had paid a damage deposit. He said he had also hired security guards and screened party attendees.

Any issues were the result of normal wear and tear, he said, adding that the rats were there when he moved in.

Climbing Over the Gate

In December, a call came into Hillsborough’s police station at 2:22 a.m. A woman, who was riding in a Lyft at the time, was on the line. She said she had been trapped at AGI House by a male resident who tried coercing her to have sex.

The man told her that she was old and “would be alone forever,” according to a police report. He was “persistent in attempting to convince” the woman “to have sex with him, and she repeatedly declined,” said the report, which redacted both names.

The woman climbed over a gate and got away unharmed, the report said.

That came on top of a pile of other incidents. In June 2025, the police arrived at AGI House after someone called with concerns about a male resident, police records show. About three weeks later, they were called again for another welfare check. By November, the police had also sent an ambulance to the house.

In his lawsuit against Nixon, Yu said he had “gone to great lengths” to distance himself and AGI House from the “party house image.” In a follow-up email, he said AGI House was not a hacker house as it did not offer an official “residency” program.

This year, Hillsborough police said, they have logged three incidents at the house.

AGI House is hosting a 10-hour event to build a “living internet” next month, according to its social calendar. A poker game night is also on the agenda.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By: Kirsten Grind/Minh Connors

c.2026 The New York Times Company