It sounds like Sam was approached on the street by a stranger, and he had a negative reaction. Which is fairly common for high profile people, especially people with a following of haters (let's not deny AI/data center general unrest).
I cannot see any legitimacy to the claim besides the commentor's own interpretation of the situation. They posit this like the authors would want to know, but here I am doing the first thing the authors of the article would do, and I'm getting downvotes for it. The author(s) won't touch it anyway.
It's a little weird to be scared of random strangers, famous or not.
If this happened when Altman was already so well-known so as to make this a problem, maybe he shouldn't have been traveling on his own?
Private security is a thing he can afford (now, at least).