OpenAI Faces Lawsuits After Failing to Report Violent ChatGPT User Before Deadly School Shooting

School-shooting lawsuits accuse OpenAI of hiding violent ChatGPT users

OpenAI could have prevented one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canada's history, a string of seven lawsuits filed Wednesday in a California court alleged. Ultimately, the AI company overruled recommendations from its internal safety team. More than eight months prior to the school shooting, trained experts had flagged a ChatGPT account later linked to the shooter as posing a credible threat of gun violence in the real world. In those cases, OpenAI is expected to notify police -- which, in this case, already had a file on the shooter and had proactively removed guns from their home previously -- but that's not what happened. Apparently, OpenAI decided that the user's privacy and the potential stress of an encounter with cops outweighed the risks of violence, whistleblowers told The Wall Street Journal. Leaders rejected the safety team's urgings and declined to report the user to law enforcement. Instead, OpenAI simply deactivated the account, then quickly followed up to tell the shooter how to get back on ChatGPT to continue planning by signing up with another email address, the lawsuits alleged. That was a mistake, Sam Altman has since said, while maintaining that the account was supposedly "banned." In a public apology shared last week with grieving community members in a 2,000-person rural mining town called Tumbler Ridge, the OpenAI CEO promised to do better next time. OpenAI will "find ways to prevent tragedies like this in the future" and to continue "working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again," Altman said. "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June," Altman said. "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered." Jay Edelson, an attorney leading a cross-border team representing families suing OpenAI, told Ars that Altman's "ridiculous" apology came too late and promised too little. His clients have filed the first of many lawsuits to come from the small town, including complaints from six families of victims killed in the shooting, as well as one mother whose daughter continues to fight for her life in intensive care. All the lawsuits will be filed in California, Edelson said, with families hoping to ensure that Altman and OpenAI are held accountable on their home turf by a jury of their peers. The lawsuits will supersede a lawsuit filed in Canada, where OpenAI was expected to contest the court's jurisdiction in what Edelson suggested was part of the company's strategy to delay litigating cases over ChatGPT-linked deaths until after the company goes public this year. According to Edelson and families suing, OpenAI has been hiding violent ChatGPT users for months to protect Altman from public criticism while the AI firm seeks the highest possible valuation. Recently, OpenAI was valued at $852 billion, but at least one market strategist told MSN that OpenAI's initial public offering (IPO) valuation was at risk as more "negative headlines" came out against the company. "OpenAI's whole strategy in these cases is just to delay as long as possible," Edelson told Ars. And "I actually think that their strategy has been largely successful," he suggested. "Their goal has been to reduce the number of visible incidents where their platform caused deaths," he alleged, since "what they've found is that it's very rare for the authorities to tie deaths back to OpenAI" without whistleblowers revealing what's happening behind closed doors. Edelson's legal team alleged that the volume of violent users on ChatGPT is likely much larger than the public knows. "If the whistleblowers hadn't come out, people likely would've never found out about how ChatGPT was encouraging this violence," Edelson said, while urging that whistleblowers are not necessarily the heroes. As families see it, OpenAI workers could've raised red flags sooner, just as OpenAI could've. But since the company under Altman apparently has "no moral center," Edelson said the "goal is just to get to an IPO" without the world knowing that "that you're sitting on a hundred billion dollars of liability." Altman, Edelson alleged, is "the face of evil," and only issued an apology a month after agreeing with Tumbler Ridge's mayor that it was necessary to address the harms. Edelson told Ars that he thinks that liability in the families' cases will be "easy" to prove and that OpenAI will face "historic" damages when the verdict lands. He expects that OpenAI anticipates the same outcome but will delay resolving the cases as long as possible while pursuing the IPO. "There's no way that Sam or OpenAI can let any of these cases go before a jury," Edelson told Ars. "That's why their strategy is to delay." OpenAI issued a statement when asked for comment: "The events in Tumbler Ridge are a tragedy," OpenAI's spokesperson said. "We have a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence. As we shared with Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat policy violators." The whole town is "devastated" Edelson recently visited Tumbler Ridge, where an 18-year-old trans woman, Jesse Van Rootselaar, used a modified rifle to open fire at a secondary school after killing her mother and brother at their home in February. Six additional victims were killed at the school, including five children and a teaching assistant, and 27 were wounded. The shooter also died from seemingly self-inflicted wounds. Shannda Aviugana-Durand, an education assistant known for sneaking kids candy on their birthdays, was killed at close range while students watched, the lawsuit alleged. Three 12-year-old girls -- Zoey Benoit, Ticaria "Tiki" Lampert, and Kylie Smith -- were bright kids who loved to sing, paint, and bring people together. Two had to be identified by their clothing because bullets left their faces unrecognizable. Some families still aren't sure of the details of their children's deaths, including the family of a 13-year-old boy, Ezekiel Schofield. Other families have the final images of their children burned into their memories, including the family of a 12-year-old boy, Abel Mwansa Jr., whose final words were "Tell my parents that I love them so much." Among those injured was 12-year-old Maya Gebala, who was shot three times in the head, neck, and cheek. Gebala might've died if other students who hid her under a desk hadn't screamed for authorities to rush her to intensive care after noticing her moving her finger. Gebala is awake, but still fighting for survival after four brain surgeries. Currently, she cannot move or speak, but she can see her mother, Cia Edmonds, who hasn't left her bedside in months. Edmonds expects that if her daughter survives, she will have permanent disabilities and lifelong complications from her brain injuries. The whole town is "devastated," Edelson told Ars. He recently visited Gebala in the hospital; the families suing have criticized Altman for failing to do the same. "She's a fighter," Edelson said. "Her mom is a fighter, but it is really hard." Edelson's team told Ars that the school has shut down and will soon be razed. In the meantime, students have been attending classes in makeshift trailers. Some students aren't ready to go back to school. Mwansa's little sister is too scared to return to the town because she feels unsafe. "What this town went through, it's just unimaginable," Edelson said. Gebala's mother, who has been separated from her other daughter while staying by Maya's side, said in the lawsuit that her primary goal was to teach her daughters that they can be strong and accomplish anything if they try hard enough. "I would give anything to go back," Edmonds said in her complaint. "I would give anything to have us whole again." OpenAI withholding chat logs seems "cruel" By neglecting the safety team's recommendations, OpenAI may have violated several state laws, families alleged. Perhaps most critically, OpenAI is accused of negligence for failing to warn law enforcement, which California law requires "when a person has actual knowledge of a specific individual's serious and foreseeable threat to cause physical harm to another." In addition to holding Altman accountable, the lawsuits seek to identify OpenAI leadership involved in overriding the safety team's decision. Additionally, the company's re-registration policy may have violated a California law that bans re-supplying a "dangerous" instrument to a "person known to be likely to use it in a manner involving unreasonable risk of physical harm to others," the lawsuits alleged. OpenAI denies that support emails tell users how to re-register with a new email address after accounts are deactivated. If OpenAI had reported Van Rootselaar to authorities, that would set a precedent compelling OpenAI to report all similar threats, the lawsuits alleged. Handling that alleged volume of incidents would supposedly require a dedicated law enforcement referral team, while OpenAI would likely take a reputational hit for reporting ChatGPT users to cops. For these reasons, OpenAI was allegedly desperate to hide Van Rootselaar's logs. Since whistleblowers outed OpenAI's mistake, cops have gotten access to the shooter's logs, but families and their legal team have not, Edelson confirmed. Instead, OpenAI is seemingly pretending to care about families while denying them closure, he alleged. "If he actually wanted to help the families, one thing he would do is provide information easily instead of making us fight in court," Edelson said. "The families need to understand exactly what happened and why it happened, and making them live through this pain for months to try to extract it out of them is just cruel." To people in Tumbler Ridge, OpenAI appeared to lie, claiming that the shooter's ChatGPT account was banned, and then the shooter supposedly evaded safeguards to open a new account. Lawsuits pointed out that OpenAI's help center teaches banned users how to skirt the safeguards, and customer support also sends an email with the same instructions when accounts are deactivated. These resources help ensure that no revenue is lost from deactivating accounts, and evidence shows the shooter followed those instructions, the lawsuits alleged. If the families get access to the logs, it will be clearer how much ChatGPT encouraged, sustained, and deepened the shooter's fixation with gun violence, families expect. They have accused OpenAI of aiding and abetting by designing ChatGPT to act as a willing co-conspirator in the school shooting. Since 2024, model specifications do not block the chatbot from engaging in conversations glorifying violence. Rather, ChatGPT is instructed to "assume best intentions" and to "never ask the user to clarify their intent for the purpose of determining whether to refuse or comply," and that's what makes ChatGPT so unsafe, families alleged. Shortly before their lawsuits were filed, OpenAI published a blog that seemed to double down on their current rules, discussing how they respond to threats of real-world violence without directly acknowledging the Tumbler Ridge case or others like it cited in families' litigation. If the families win their lawsuits, OpenAI could be forced to change those rules to block more dangerous sessions and possibly to change ChatGPT's overall design to be less sycophantic. They may also be required to ban users flagged as potentially violent by forcing them to self-identify and to stop telling those users how to open new accounts despite bans. Experts are seemingly unsure what solutions may be best to ensure that law enforcement is notified of active threats but not inundated by inconsequential incident reports, especially if the volume of violent ChatGPT users is as high as families suspect. Some experts think police should be making those calls, The New York Times reported, while others think turning OpenAI into de facto government agents might trigger more unconstitutional searches. For Edmonds, who has lost income while attending to her injured daughter, damages are owed to cover lost earnings, her lawsuit alleged. Other families coping with loved ones' injuries are expected to file lawsuits in the next three weeks. Edelson told Ars that the delay is simply because the legal team doesn't have the resources to file so many lawsuits at once. OpenAI could end up owing substantial damages, including punitive damages, if a jury in California agrees that OpenAI owed a duty to report the shooter to authorities who may have acted to block the threat and protect the Canadian families. "We think it's really important that the people who judge Sam at the end of the day are his neighbors," Edelson told Ars.

OpenAI CEO apologizes to Tumbler Ridge community | TechCrunch

In a letter to the residents of Tumbler Ridge, Canada, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is "deeply sorry" that his company failed to alert law enforcement about the suspect in a recent mass shooting. After police identified 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar as a suspected shooter who allegedly killed eight people, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had flagged and banned Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT account in June 2025 for describing scenarios involving gun violence. The company's staff debated alerting police but ultimately decided against it, eventually reaching out to Canadian authorities after the shooting. OpenAI has since said that it is improving safety protocols, for example by putting more flexible criteria in place to determine when accounts get referred to authorities, and by establishing direct points of contact with Canadian law enforcement. In Altman's letter, which was first published in the local newspaper Tumbler RidgeLines, the CEO said he'd discussed the shooting with Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darryl Krakowka and British Columbia Premier David Eby, and they'd all agreed "a public apology was necessary," but "time was also needed to respect the community as you grieved." "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June," Altman said. "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered." Altman also said that OpenAI's focus will "continue to be on working with all levels of government to help ensure nothing happens like this again." In a post on X, Eby said Altman's apology is "necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge." Canadian officials have said they are considering new regulations on artificial intelligence but have not made any final decisions.

OpenAI Faces Lawsuits Over Deadly Mass Shooting in Canada

Expertise Smart home | Smart security | Home tech | Energy savings | A/V The families of victims of a February school shooting in British Columbia opened seven lawsuits Wednesday against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. The lawsuits, filed in federal court in San Francisco, claim that OpenAI's actions regarding the shooter's use of its AI allowed the shooting to happen. The cases could have major implications for future chatbot safeguards and whether companies can be held liable for how people use artificial intelligence. The shooting occurred on Feb. 10 when an 18-year-old former student entered a secondary school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, and opened fire using a modified handgun, killing five children and an education assistant, according to news reports. Investigators allege that the shooter had also killed her mother and half-brother. The combined fatalities made this one of the deadliest shootings in Canadian history. The shooter died at the scene, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The shooter had engaged ChatGPT in conversations involving violence before the attack. OpenAI says it has taken steps intended to address issues raised by the lawsuits. "We have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat policy violators," an OpenAI spokesperson told CNET in an email. OpenAI co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman wrote a letter to the families, which was published on the local news site Tumbler RidgeLines. "The pain your community has endured is unimaginable," Altman wrote. He referred to the shooter's ChatGPT account, writing, "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June." CBS News reports that the shooter's account was flagged in 2025 for misusing ChatGPT for "violent activities" and then banned. OpenAI told CBS that it considered flagging the account to law enforcement but determined it "did not pose an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others." According to The Guardian, the shooter was able to create a second account that OpenAI was unaware of until after the shooting. These are not the only legal and regulatory challenges facing OpenAI over its AI chat products. Earlier in April, Florida officials announced they were investigating OpenAI about whether a shooter who killed two people at Florida State University in Tallahassee used ChatGPT in connection with the attack. Separately, a March lawsuit filed by Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica says OpenAI improperly used copyrighted material to train its AI systems. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) The company is also navigating a series of product and business pressures, including shuttering its generative video model, Sora and halting work on an adult mode for ChatGPT. It has also faced scrutiny from investors after missing certain internal revenue and user growth targets ahead of a potential public offering.

OpenAI Sued in US by Families of Canada School Shooting Victims

OpenAI is the target of new lawsuits over the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, that allege the artificial intelligence company could have stopped the suspected killer from using its popular chatbot, ChatGPT, ahead of the attack. One of the cases, which were filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco against OpenAI and its chief executive officer, Sam Altman, was brought by a 12-year-old, who was shot during the incident and remains in intensive care, and her mother. Another lawsuit was brought by the mother of a girl killed in the shooting. According to the lawsuits, OpenAI knew that Jesse Van Rootselaar, who was identified as the chief suspect behind the massacre in February at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, was planning the attack due to the shooter's ChatGPT use, but made a "conscious decision not to warn authorities." "ChatGPT played a role in the mass shooting and OpenAI could have, and should have, prevented it," according to the complaints, which allege the startup wanted to avoid having to contact police each time OpenAI's safety team spotted a ChatGPT user planning to carry out a violent act. OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A series of suits have been filed so far against chatbot makers since 2024, most of them targeting OpenAI and ChatGPT. Most of the suits allege that extensive use of the technology has inflicted a range of harms on children and adults alike, fostering delusionsBloomberg Terminal and despair for some and leading others to death by suicide and even murder-suicideBloomberg Terminal. On Feb. 10, Van Rootselaar allegedly carried out the mass shooting in northeastern British Columbia, killing eight people -- including her mother and stepbrother, along with six others at the school, five of whom were children, and injuring more than two dozen others. Van Rootselaar, 18, was found dead after the shooting from what appeared to be a self-inflicted wound. In the wake of the shooting, OpenAI said it banned Van Rootselaar for violating its ChatGPT usage policy last June. Her account was flagged at the time for messages deemed to have potential for violence, but OpenAI did not alert police. The Wall Street Journal first reported on OpenAI's decision, saying concerned employees urged the startup to report the situation to authorities. Later in February, OpenAI revealed that the suspected killer created a second ChatGPT account it did not spot until her name was released by police; OpenAI told Canadian lawmakers that, under newly updated company rules, it would have referred Van Rootselaar to police. Last week, Altman wrote in a letter published by Tumbler RidgeLines, a local news site, that he wanted to express his "deepest condolences to the entire community." "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June," Altman wrote. "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered." The lawsuits come at a sensitive time for OpenAI, which is eyeing a much-anticipated public offering that's poised to be one of the largest in history as the company approaches a trillion-dollar valuation. OpenAI is also trying to fend off claims by Elon Musk that it abandoned its founding mission as a nonprofit when it restructured last year as a for-profit entity. At a trial in California that started this week, Musk may ask a judge to order the conversion to be unwound.

Families of Canadian mass shooting victims sue OpenAI, CEO Altman in US court

April 29 (Reuters) - Family members of victims of one of Canada's deadliest mass shootings sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in U.S. court on Wednesday, alleging the company identified the shooter as a credible threat eight months before the attack but did not warn police. The lawsuits, filed in federal court in San Francisco, accuse OpenAI leaders of not alerting police because it would have exposed the volume of violence-related conversations on ChatGPT and potentially jeopardized the company's path to a nearly $1 trillion initial public offering. The February shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia left nine people dead, many of them children. An OpenAI spokesperson called the shooting "a tragedy" and said the company has a zero-tolerance policy for using its tools to assist in committing violence. "As we shared with Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat policy violators," the spokesperson said in a statement. The cases are part of a growing wave of lawsuits accusing artificial intelligence ⁠companies of failing to prevent chatbot interactions that plaintiffs say contribute to self-harm, mental illness and violence. They appear to be the first in the U.S. to allege that ChatGPT played a role in facilitating a mass shooting. Jay Edelson, who is representing the plaintiffs, said he plans to file another two dozen lawsuits in the coming weeks against the company on behalf of other people impacted by the shooting. LAWSUITS CLAIM OPENAI SAFETY TEAM OVERRULED Jesse Van Rootselaar, whose interactions with ChatGPT are at the center of the lawsuits, shot her mother and stepbrother at home before killing an educational assistant and five students aged 12 to 13 at her former school on February 10, according to police. Van Rootselaar, who was 18, then died by suicide. The plaintiffs include relatives of those killed at the school and a 12-year-old girl who survived after being shot three times but remains in intensive care. According to one of the complaints, OpenAI's automated systems in June 2025 flagged ChatGPT conversations in which the shooter described gun violence scenarios. Safety team members recommended contacting the police after concluding she posed a credible and imminent threat of harm, said the complaint, which cites a Wall Street Journal article from February about the company's internal discussions. But Altman ⁠and other OpenAI leadership overruled the safety team and police were never called, the lawsuit alleges. The shooter's account was deactivated, but she was able to get a new account and continue using the platform to plan her attack, the lawsuit claims. Following the publication of the Wall Street Journal article, the company said the account was flagged by systems that identify "misuses of our models in furtherance of violent activities" but the issues did not meet its internal criteria for reporting to law enforcement. Last week, a local Tumbler Ridge newspaper published an open letter in which Altman said he was "deeply sorry" the account was not flagged to law enforcement. In a blog published Tuesday, OpenAI said it ⁠trains its models to refuse requests that could "meaningfully enable violence," and notifies law enforcement when conversations suggest "an imminent and credible risk of harm to others," with mental health experts helping assess borderline cases. The company said it continually refines its models and detection methods based on usage and expert input. The lawsuits seek an unspecified amount of damages and a court order requiring OpenAI to overhaul its safety practices, including mandatory law enforcement referral protocols. One ⁠of the victims originally filed her lawsuit in Canadian court but dismissed it to pursue her claims in California, Edelson said. OPENAI FACES MULTIPLE SUITS The lawsuits over the Tumbler Ridge shooting come after multiple lawsuits against OpenAI have been filed in U.S. state and federal court in recent months over claims ChatGPT facilitated harmful behavior, suicide, and, in at least one case, a murder-suicide. The lawsuits, which are still in ⁠early phases, will force courts to grapple with what role an AI platform can play in promoting violence and whether the company can be held liable for its actions or the actions of its users. OpenAI has denied the claims in the lawsuits, arguing in the murder-suicide case that the perpetrator had a long history of mental illness. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced earlier this month a criminal investigation into ChatGPT's role in a 2025 shooting at Florida State University. Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones and Diana Novak Jones, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Lincoln Feast. Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Litigation * Criminal * Product Liability Ryan Patrick Jones Thomson Reuters Ryan is a breaking news correspondent based in Toronto covering breaking news, national affairs and politics in the United States and Canada. Diana Novak Jones Thomson Reuters Diana reports on product liability, litigation, mass torts and the plaintiffs' bar. She previously worked at Law360 and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Families of Tumbler Ridge shooting victims sue OpenAI - Engadget

Just days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote a public apology to people of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia in the aftermath of the town's deadly February 10 school shooting, the families of the victims of the traumatic event are suing OpenAI for negligence. The mass shooting, one of the deadliest in Canadian history, saw the alleged shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, enter the town's local high school and kill five students and one teacher, as well as critically injure two others, before taking her own life. Local police later discovered Van Rootselaar had also killed her mother and 11-year-old half-brother before entering the school. Per NPR, lawyers representing some of the families of Tumbler Ridge filed six different suits on Wednesday in a federal court in San Francisco. One of the complaints, filed on behalf of Maya Gebala, a survivor of the shooting, alleges OpenAI's automated safety systems flagged Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT conversations in June 2025, more than half a year before she entered the town's high school with a long gun and modified rifle, for "gun violence activity and planning." It further claims OpenAI's safety team urged management to contact authorities, but that the company chose instead to deactivate Van Rootselaar account. She later created a second account and continued her conversations with ChatGPT. "The events in Tumbler Ridge are a tragedy. We have a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence," an OpenAI spokesperson told Engadget. "As we shared with Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat violators." On late Tuesday, OpenAI published a blog post outlining its safety policies. "As part of this ongoing work, we've continued expanding our safeguards to help ChatGPT better recognize subtle signs of risk of harm across different contexts. Some safety risks only become clear over time: a single message may seem harmless on its own, but a broader pattern within a long conversation -- or across conversations -- can suggest something more concerning," the company wrote. The suits filed on Wednesday are the latest attempt to use the legal system to hold OpenAI accountable for the design of its products. Last summer, the parents of Adam Raine, a teen who committed suicide in 2025, filed the first known wrongful death suit against an AI company, alleging ChatGPT was aware of four previous attempts by Raine to take his own life before he was ultimately successful.

Families of Canadian mass shooting victims sue OpenAI, CEO Altman in U.S. court

Community members attend a vigil to honor the victims of one of Canada's deadliest mass shootings in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada, on February 13, 2026. Family members of victims of one of Canada's deadliest mass shootings sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in U.S. court on Wednesday, alleging the company identified the shooter as a credible threat eight months before the attack but did not warn police. The lawsuits, filed in federal court in San Francisco, accuse OpenAI leaders of not alerting police because it would have exposed the volume of violence-related conversations on ChatGPT and potentially jeopardized the company's path to a nearly $1 trillion initial public offering. The February shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia left nine people dead, many of them children. An OpenAI spokesperson called the shooting "a tragedy" and said the company has a zero-tolerance policy for using its tools to assist in committing violence. "As we shared with Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat policy violators," the spokesperson said in a statement. The cases are part of a growing wave of lawsuits accusing artificial intelligence companies of failing to prevent chatbot interactions that plaintiffs say contribute to self-harm, mental illness and violence. They appear to be the first in the U.S. to allege that ChatGPT played a role in facilitating a mass shooting. Jay Edelson, who is representing the plaintiffs, said he plans to file another two dozen lawsuits in the coming weeks against the company on behalf of other people impacted by the shooting.

Families of Canada school shooting victims sue OpenAI over shooter's use of ChatGPT

The families of victims of a school shooting in a Canadian Rockies town are suing artificial intelligence company OpenAI in U.S. federal court, seeking to hold the ChatGPT maker responsible for failing to alert police to the shooter's alarming interactions with the chatbot. A lawsuit filed Wednesday on behalf of 12-year-old Maya Gebala, who was critically injured in the February shooting, is among the first of dozens of cases that families in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia are planning with claims alleging wrongful death, negligence and product liability. Plaintiffs' attorney Jay Edelson said in an interview that decisions made by OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman "have destroyed the town. The people are really resilient, but what happened is unimaginable." Altman sent a letter last week formally apologizing to the community that his company did not notify law enforcement about the shooter's online behavior. Authorities have said the shooter killed her mother and 11-year-old stepbrother in their home on Feb. 10 before opening fire at the nearby Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, killing five children and an educator before killing herself. Twenty-five people were also injured in the attack, Canada's deadliest mass shooting in years. The case highlights concerns about the harms posed by overly agreeable AI chatbots and what obligations the tech industry has to control them or notify authorities about planned violence by chatbot users. This month, prosecutors investigating the deaths of two University of South Florida doctoral students said that the suspect asked ChatGPT about body disposal in the lead-up to the students' disappearance. In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI said in a written statement that the "events in Tumbler Ridge are a tragedy. We have a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence." "As we shared with Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat policy violators," the company said. Edelson, a Chicago-based lawyer known for taking on the tech industry, is already juggling a number of high-profile cases against OpenAI, including from the family of a California teenager who killed himself after conversations with ChatGPT and another from the heirs of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman killed by her son after ChatGPT allegedly amplified the man's "paranoid delusions." "This is not a passive technology," said Edelson, comparing the chatbot interactions with a more conventional online search for information. "What we've seen in the past is that (for) people who are mentally ill, the chatbot will validate what they're saying and then amplify what they're saying." Last week, Edelson visited the small town of Tumbler Ridge and met with dozens of people in the basement of a visitor center. He also visited Gebala at a children's hospital in Vancouver, where she remains hospitalized and seemed alert but unable to speak. "It was so heartbreaking," he said. The lawsuits filed Wednesday represent the families of the five slain children targeted in the school shooting: Zoey Benoit, Abel Mwansa Jr., Ticaria "Tiki" Lampert and Kylie Smith, all 12, and Ezekiel Schofield, 13, and the education assistant, Shannda Aviugana-Durand. After the shootings, OpenAI came forward to say that last June the company had flagged the shooter's account had been used to discuss violence against other people. The company said it considered whether to refer the account to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police but determined at the time that the account activity didn't meet a threshold for referral to law enforcement. OpenAI banned the account in June for violating its usage policy. The lawsuits filed Wednesday allege "the victims didn't learn this because OpenAI was forthcoming, but because its own employees leaked it to The Wall Street Journal after they could no longer stomach the company's silence." In his letter posted Friday, Altman said he was "deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June." "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered," Altman wrote. British Columbia Premier David Eby, in a social media post, called the apology "necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge." The Gebala lawsuit accuses OpenAI of negligence involving a failure to warn law enforcement and "aiding and abetting a mass shooting." Along with damages, the Gebala lawsuit seeks a court order that would require OpenAI to ban users from ChatGPT if their accounts were deactivated for violent misuse, and to require the company to alert law enforcement when their systems identify someone who poses a "real-world risk of violence." An earlier case was filed in a court in British Columbia but a team of lawyers in both countries is seeking to bring the affiliated cased to San Francisco, where OpenAI is headquartered. -- -- - AP journalist Jim Morris contributed to this story from Vancouver, British Columbia.

Sam Altman apologises after OpenAI chose not to report ChatGPT user who carried out Tumbler Ridge school shooting

Sam Altman published an open letter to the community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, on Thursday, apologising for OpenAI's failure to alert law enforcement after its own systems flagged a user who went on to carry out the deadliest school shooting in Canada in nearly four decades. "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June," Altman wrote. "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered." The letter, dated April 23 and released publicly a day later, arrived 72 days after Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, killed eight people and injured 27 others in a shooting that began at a family home and ended at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School on February 10. OpenAI's automated abuse detection had flagged Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT account eight months earlier, in June 2025. Approximately a dozen employees reviewed the flagged conversations, which described scenarios involving gun violence, and some recommended contacting Canadian police. Company leadership decided against it. The account was banned. No one was told. Van Rootselaar created a second account and was not detected until after the RCMP released a name. The Wall Street Journal first reported the internal debate at OpenAI. The employees who reviewed Van Rootselaar's flagged account saw what they described as signs of "an imminent risk of serious harm to others." They escalated their recommendation to report the conversations to law enforcement. Leadership applied what an OpenAI spokesperson later called a "higher threshold" for credible and imminent threat reporting and concluded the activity did not meet it. The account was terminated. The conversations were preserved internally. The police were not contacted. Eight months later, Van Rootselaar killed her mother, Jennifer Strang, 39, and her 11-year-old half-brother, Emmett Jacobs, at the family home, then drove to the secondary school and opened fire with a modified rifle, killing education assistant Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39, and five students aged 12 and 13: Zoey Benoit, Ticaria Lampert, Kylie Smith, Abel Mwansa, and Ezekiel Schofield. Twenty-seven people were injured. Maya Gebala, 12, was shot three times in the head and neck while shielding classmates and sustained what doctors described as a "catastrophic, traumatic brain injury" with permanent cognitive and physical disability. Van Rootselaar died by suicide at the school. The civil lawsuit filed in BC Supreme Court in March by Cia Edmonds on behalf of her daughter Maya alleges that ChatGPT provided "information, guidance, and assistance to plan a mass casualty event, including the types of weapons to be used, and describing precedents from other mass casualty events or historical acts of violence." The specific content of the conversations has not been made public. BC Premier David Eby said he deliberately did not ask what was in the chat logs to avoid compromising the RCMP investigation. What is known is that OpenAI's own system identified the conversations as potentially dangerous, that OpenAI's own employees recommended action, and that OpenAI's leadership chose not to act. The apology is not for a failure of detection. The detection worked. The apology is for what happened after detection worked. Altman's letter was addressed to the Tumbler Ridge community and released after BC Premier Eby disclosed that Altman had agreed to apologise during earlier discussions about OpenAI's handling of the case. "I have been thinking of you often over the past few months," Altman wrote. "I cannot imagine anything worse in the world than losing a child." He added: "I reaffirm the commitment I made to the mayor and premier to find ways to prevent tragedies like this in the future. Going forward, our focus will continue to be working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again." The letter contained no specific policy commitments, no description of what OpenAI would change, and no acknowledgement that employees had recommended reporting the account and been overruled. Eby called the apology "necessary" but "grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge." Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darryl Krakowka acknowledged receipt and asked for "care and consideration" while the community navigates the grieving process. The policy commitments came separately, in a letter from OpenAI vice-president of global policy Ann O'Leary to Canadian federal ministers. O'Leary wrote that OpenAI had lowered its reporting threshold so that a user no longer needs to discuss "the target, means, and timing" of planned violence for a conversation to be flagged for law enforcement referral. The company has enlisted mental health and behavioural experts to help assess flagged cases and established a direct point of contact with the RCMP. O'Leary stated that under the updated policies, Van Rootselaar's interactions "would have been referred to police" if discovered today. The changes are voluntary. They are not legally binding. They can be reversed at any time. Canada has no law requiring AI companies to report threats identified through their platforms, and the federal government has not yet introduced one. Tumbler Ridge is not an isolated case. Florida has opened the first criminal investigation into an AI company after ChatGPT allegedly advised the gunman in a mass shooting at Florida State University, including guidance on how to make a firearm operational moments before the attack that killed two people and injured five. NPR reported on April 23 that "OpenAI is under scrutiny after two mass shooters used ChatGPT to plan attacks." Seven families have separately sued OpenAI over ChatGPT acting as what their attorneys describe as a "suicide coach," with documented deaths in Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Oregon. In another case, OpenAI is being sued for allegedly ignoring three warnings about a dangerous user, including its own internal mass-casualty flag. The number of reported AI safety incidents rose from 149 in 2023 to 233 in 2024, a 56% increase, and the 2025 and 2026 figures will be significantly higher. The pattern that connects these cases is not that AI systems are spontaneously generating violence. It is that AI companies are identifying dangerous behaviour on their platforms and making internal decisions about whether to act on it, decisions that carry life-and-death consequences but are governed by no external standard, no legal obligation, and no regulatory oversight. The deeper risks of emotional dependency on AI chatbots, including the phenomenon researchers have termed "AI psychosis," raise questions about what happens when systems optimised to sustain engagement become confidantes for users in crisis. OpenAI's "higher threshold" for reporting was a business judgement, not a legal standard. The employees who recommended contacting police applied their own moral reasoning. The executives who overruled them applied a different calculus, one that presumably weighed the reputational and legal risks of reporting against the reputational and legal risks of not reporting, and got it catastrophically wrong. OpenAI announced an external safety fellowship hours after a New Yorker investigation reported it had dissolved its internal safety team, a sequence that captures the company's approach to safety governance with uncomfortable precision. The superalignment team, led by Ilya Sutskever before his departure, was disbanded. The AGI-readiness team was dissolved. Safety was dropped from OpenAI's IRS filings when the company converted from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure. OpenAI's own robotics chief resigned over safety governance concerns, specifically objecting that "surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got." The external fellowship, the voluntary policy changes, and Altman's letter all share a common characteristic: they are gestures that OpenAI controls. They can be announced, modified, or withdrawn without external approval. They create the appearance of accountability without the mechanism of it. OpenAI's recent release of open-source safety policies for teen users covers graphic violence, dangerous activities, and other harm categories. OpenAI itself described these as a "meaningful safety floor," not a comprehensive solution. The gap between floor and ceiling is where Tumbler Ridge happened. The system flagged a teenager describing gun violence scenarios. The policy said that was not enough to report. The teenager went on to kill eight people. A lower threshold would have triggered a report to the RCMP. Whether the RCMP would have acted on it, whether Canadian law would have permitted intervention based on ChatGPT conversations, whether any of that would have prevented the shooting are questions that cannot be answered because the report was never made. OpenAI's updated policy now says it would make the report. But the updated policy is still voluntary, still internal, and still subject to the same leadership override that prevented the original report from being filed. Canada's AI minister, Evan Solomon, said OpenAI's commitments "do not go far enough." Federal ministers from the innovation, justice, public safety, and culture portfolios met with OpenAI representatives after the government summoned the company's executives in late February. A joint task force between Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and Public Safety Canada is reviewing AI safety reporting protocols, with preliminary recommendations expected by summer 2026. Bill C-27, which contains the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, was Canada's proposed AI regulation framework but is now widely regarded as inadequate. Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, was designed for social media platforms, not generative AI systems that conduct one-on-one conversations with users. The federal government has tabled new "lawful access" legislation to give police powers to pursue online data from foreign companies, but it does not specifically require AI companies to report threatening behaviour. Canada currently has no legal framework for assigning responsibility when an AI company possesses information that could prevent violence and chooses not to share it. This is the gap that Altman's letter cannot close. An apology addresses a past failure. A voluntary policy change addresses a future risk. Neither addresses the structural problem, which is that a company valued at $852 billion, racing to build artificial general intelligence, serving hundreds of millions of users, employing systems that can identify dangerous behaviour in real time, operates under no legal obligation to tell anyone what it finds. OpenAI's employees saw a threat. OpenAI's leadership decided the threat did not meet the company's internal standard. Eight people are dead. The standard has been lowered. The next decision will be made by the same company, under the same voluntary framework, with the same absence of legal consequence for getting it wrong. Altman wrote that he shares the letter "with the understanding that everyone grieves in their own way and in their own time." Tumbler Ridge is grieving. The question is not whether Sam Altman is sorry. The question is whether being sorry is a policy.

Families sue OpenAI over Canadian mass shooter's use of ChatGPT

A woman mourns at a makeshift memorial for the victims of a deadly mass shooting that took place in the town of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. A lawsuit filed Wednesday claims that OpenAI was negligent for failing to report the shooter to authorities after her account was flagged for "gun violence activity and planning." Paige Taylor White/AFP via Getty Images hide caption Families of those injured and killed in a school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia are suing OpenAI for negligence and providing a dangerously defective version of ChatGPT to the shooter. The six suits, filed in federal court in San Francisco, allege that OpenAI failed to take actions that could have prevented injuries and deaths in the shooting, which took place on February 10. They claim that the company failed to report the shooter's conversations with ChatGPT to authorities, and that ChatGPT itself was a defective product that did not challenge the shooter or direct her to seek real-world help. The suits are the latest seeking to hold a tech company responsible over the design of its products, a once-novel legal approach that is being increasingly used against chatbot makers, social media and other platforms. For those who lost loved ones "there's nothing that the legal system can do that will make them whole again," Edelson told NPR in an interview. He added that they hope the trials will hold OpenAI leadership to account: "They should not be trusted to have the most powerful consumer technology on the planet." In a statement in response to the lawsuits, OpenAI said it had a "zero tolerance" policy for using its tools to assist in committing violence: "We have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources," an OpenAI spokesperson told NPR in an email. In a lengthy blog post published late Tuesday, OpenAI further explained its policies: "When conversations indicate an imminent and credible risk of harm to others, we notify law enforcement." The shooting at Tumbler Ridge is among the deadliest in Canadian history. It occurred when Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, entered the local secondary school with a long gun and a modified handgun, according to authorities. Van Rootselaar proceeded to kill five students and a teacher before killing herself. Authorities later learned that she had also killed her mother and 11-year-old half-brother at their home prior to coming to the school. Around two-dozen others were injured in the attack. The lawsuits filed on Wednesday allege that ChatGPT, and specifically the model GPT-4o, played a crucial role in the events at Tumbler Ridge. One of the complaints, filed on behalf of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old grievously injured in the shooting, alleges that Van Rootselaar was on ChatGPT months before the shooting, and that in June of 2025, OpenAI's automated system flagged her account for "gun violence activity and planning." A safety team reviewed the content and urged OpenAI management to notify the authorities, but the complaint alleges that the company's leadership chose instead to deactivate the account. They also failed to act, the lawsuit argues, when the shooter created a second account and continued her conversations with ChatGPT. Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman apologized to the community: "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June," he wrote. "Going forward, our focus will continue to be on working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again." In addition to allegedly failing to notify authorities of the imminent danger, the lawsuit claims that OpenAI knowingly rolled out a defective product to the public. "The Tumbler Ridge attack was an entirely foreseeable result of deliberate design choices by OpenAI made with full knowledge of where those choices led," the complaint from Gebala says. "GPT-4o was built to accept, reinforce, and elaborate users' violent thoughts rather than challenge them, interrupt them, or direct users to real-world help." The events around Tumbler Ridge are "as clear as possible a demonstration of the moral hazard that comes with centralizing authority over safety at a place like OpenAI," said Tim Marple, who worked at OpenAI in the division responsible for spotting threats. Marple, now the co-director of Maiden Labs, a non-profit that works to identify AI risks, said he was unsurprised that the company had failed to contact the authorities. "When I worked there and since I left, the only things I can see characterizing their behavior are incompetence and greed," Marple, who is not associated with the latest lawsuit, said. He believes regulation, including mandatory reporting laws, are needed to prevent similar tragedies from happening again. But not everyone agrees that lawsuits and regulation will help prevent tragedies like Tumbler Ridge. "What causes somebody to commit an atrocity is often not clear," said Eric Goldman, associate dean of research at Santa Clara University School of Law. Goldman worries that overly stringent regulation could make the chatbots less useful to those who need them. He also rejects the idea that chatbots should be treated as defective products. For him, the issue is really about free speech. "I would ask some really tough questions about a lawsuit like this. Is this really the right way to regulate speech, even though, in some cases, speech can contribute to people making poor choices in their lives?" Goldman said. Regardless, Goldman said that negligence and defective product complaints are growing. "These legal theories are the new frontier of Internet law," he said. The number of civil and criminal investigations into AI companies is on the rise, agrees Meetali Jain, the executive director of Tech Justice Law, an advocacy group critical of the tech industry that has been involved in several lawsuits against large companies. Jain's group helped represent the family of a teenager who died by suicide after he had extensive conversations with a chatbot made by the company Character.AI. That case is currently in settlement talks, but she's hearing more and more examples of AI chatbots causing problems: "In the last year we've started to receive stories of people who've been harmed" by many different companies' bots, she said. Jain said she expects to see even more lawsuits like the ones filed on Wednesday in the future. In the absence of strong regulation, Jain said the civil claims are providing "a bulwark against the AI companies continuing to move recklessly and without any constraints whatsoever."

Families sue OpenAI over failure to report Canada mass shooter's behavior on ChatGPT

New lawsuits allege employees urged company to notify authorities months before deadly Tumbler Ridge attack Families of seven victims of a mass shooting at a secondary school in British Columbia are suing OpenAI and the company's CEO for negligence after it failed to alert authorities to the shooter's troubling conversations with ChatGPT. The lawsuits, filed on Wednesday in a federal court in San Francisco, allege that the violent intentions of the shooter, identified as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, were well-known to OpenAI. Employees at the company flagged the shooter's account eight months before the attack and determined that it posed "a credible and specific threat of gun violence against real people", according to the lawsuit. The families allege that employees urged Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, and other senior leaders to notify Canadian law enforcement eight months before the attack, but the company decided not to warn authorities and deactivated the shooter's account instead. Much of this is based on accounts that employees inside the company told the Wall Street Journal. The decision to not alert law enforcement led to the devastation of the rural community of Tumbler Ridge, the suit alleges, where on 10 February the shooter stormed the secondary school with a modified rifle and opened fire. They shot the first person they came across in a stairwell, and proceeded to the library, where they killed five others and injured 27 more. The shooter then killed themself. Before going to the school, the shooter killed their mother and 11-year-old brother in their family home. The school victims range in age from 12 to 13 and include a 39-year-old teaching assistant. One of the survivors, 12-year-old Maya Gebala, was shot in the head, neck and cheek. She has been in intensive care at Vancouver's children's hospital since the shooting and has received four brain operations. If she survives, she will likely have permanent disabilities, her attorneys said. The families who brought the seven lawsuits accuse OpenAI and Altman of negligence, aiding and abetting a mass shooting, wrongful death, and product liability. Their lawyers say it is the first wave of suits against the AI company over the shooting, and about two dozen more cases are forthcoming. In a statement to the Guardian, OpenAI said: "The events in Tumbler Ridge are a tragedy. We have a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence. As we shared with Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat policy violators." After the Guardian reached out for comment, OpenAI published a new blog post about its "commitment to safety" and how it "protects community safety". The attack was one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canadian history. In the aftermath, questions swirled in the small community about how it could have happened. Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT account was banned eight months prior to the shooting, after OpenAI's safety team flagged it for violent conversations, according to the lawsuit. However, the shooter was able to quickly create a new one, the suit alleges. Although OpenAI says that the shooter created a second account the company was unaware of until after the shooting, the lawsuits say the company provides users with instructions on how to return to ChatGPT if they are deactivated, which the shooter followed. "The fact that Sam and the leadership overruled the safety team, and then children died, adults died, the whole town was ruined, is pretty close to the definition of evil to me," said Jay Edelson, the lead lawyer representing the Tumbler Ridge plaintiffs. The lawsuit alleges that the choice to conceal the shooter's interactions with ChatGPT from Canadian authorities, and later tell the public that the shooter sneaked back on to the platform, was made in the interest of "corporate survival" and to protect the company's IPO, which has an expected valuation of $1tn and could make Altman one of the wealthiest people in the world. OpenAI has declined to share the logs between its chatbot and the Tumbler Ridge shooter, Edelson said. Late last week, Altman sent a letter to the Tumbler Ridge community apologizing for not notifying Canadian police about what OpenAI knew regarding the shooter's potential threat. "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered," Altman wrote. "I reaffirm the commitment I made to the mayor and the premier to find ways to prevent tragedies like this in the future." David Eby, the British Columbia premier, posted the letter to social media with the comment: "The apology is necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge." On 26 February, a little over two weeks after the shooting, OpenAI's vice-president of global policy, Ann O'Leary, sent a letter to Evan Solomon, Canada's minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation. O'Leary wrote that based on what the company saw when the shooter's account was deactivated, it did not "identify credible and imminent planning that met our threshold to refer the matter to law enforcement". This decision came despite the warnings from OpenAI's safety team that the account should have been reported. O'Leary also spelled out the actions the company was planning to take, such as strengthening their relationship with Canadian law enforcement and bulking up its system to detect users who are repeatedly banned from ChatGPT but subsequently make new accounts. The lawsuits are part of a groundswell of cases against AI companies over allegations that their chatbots are exacerbating mental health crises and provoking violent acts. In November, seven complaints were filed against OpenAI, blaming ChatGPT for acting as a "suicide coach". Google was sued last month after its Gemini chatbot allegedly encouraged a 36-year-old man to stage a "catastrophic accident" and then kill himself. Google has said it is working to improve its safeguards and OpenAI said it is reviewing the lawsuit's filings. In Florida, the attorney general recently opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI after reviewing messages between ChatGPT and a gunman accused of committing a mass shooting on the Florida State University campus - the first such criminal inquiry into a tech company. Lawyers for the Tumbler Ridge families say they believe their cases could support similar criminal liability against the company. The company told NBC News it was not responsible for the shooting and has answered the state's questions. It's another example of the now-common approach of using lawsuits to hold entities such as gunmakers and dealers and the US federal government accountable for alleged inaction that has led to shooting deaths and injuries. The seven Tumbler Ridge lawsuits are filed on behalf of Gebala, the family of the teaching assistant, Shannda Aviugana-Durand, and the families of five of the children who died in the school shooting. Those victims include Zoey Benoit, Ticaria "Tiki" Lampert, Kylie Smith, Ezekiel Schofield and Abel Mwansa Jr. The families say the loss is unbearable. Mwansa's parents, who immigrated to Canada from Zambia three years ago, say their 12-year-old was a good listener who made his sister breakfast every morning. One of his friends who survived the shooting said Mwansa's final words were: "Tell my parents that I love them so much."

OpenAI apologizes for not reporting Tumbler Ridge shooting suspect

On Friday, local news site Tumbler Ridgelines published an apology from OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman concerning a mass shooting. The letter, dated April 23, is addressed to the community of Tumbler Ridge, a small town in British Columbia, Canada, where the alleged shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed eight people and then herself on Feb. 10. Van Rootselaar used ChatGPT, and her first account was suspended in June 2025 after it detected content that presented as "an indication of potential real-world violence." She was then banned, but OpenAI didn't report her to law enforcement, and she was able to create a second ChatGPT account that wasn't discovered until after the shooting. Weeks after the shooting, OpenAI announced it would change its safety protocols. British Columbia Premier David Eby stated in March that Sam Altman would apologize and call for better regulations, and, as Tumbler Ridgelines pointed out, it's now here a month later. "When I spoke with Mayor [Darryl] Krakowka and Premier Eby about this tragedy, they conveyed the anger, sadness, and concern being felt across Tumbler Ridge. We agreed a public apology was necessary, but that time was also needed to respect the community as you grieved. I share this letter with the understanding that everyone grieves in their own way and in their own time," the letter states. Altman goes on to say that he's "deeply sorry" that OpenAI didn't alert law enforcement when the ChatGPT account was banned in June. "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered," he wrote. He also said he commits to finding "ways to prevent tragedies like this in the future." "Going forward, our focus will continue to be on working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again," Altman wrote. Eby posted on X that the apology is "necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge." Days prior, on Wednesday, he said that the investigation into the shooting has reached its final stages. The apology also comes days after Florida's attorney general announced an investigation into OpenAI and ChatGPT following a mass shooting at Florida State University in April 2025. A recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that eight in 10 popular AI chatbots assisted in planning violent crimes.

OpenAI Just Published an Absolutely Bizarre Blog Post

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Yesterday, OpenAI published a balmy blog post on its "commitment to community safety." Taking a reassuring tone, the post walks readers through a series of unobjectionable commitments. It declares that "mass shootings, threats against public officials, bombing attempts, and attacks on communities and individuals are an unacceptable and grave reality in today's world," which is true. It reflects on "how quickly violent intent can move from words to action," before adding that people may "bring these moments and feelings into ChatGPT," a product that the company says it's training to "recognize the difference" between hypothetical and imminent violence -- and "to draw lines when a conversation starts to move toward threats, potential harm to others, or real-world planning." It adds that OpenAI is working to expand its safeguards "to help ChatGPT better recognize subtle signs of risk of harm across different contexts," and explains that it will work to "surface real-world support and refer to law enforcement when appropriate" based on a user's interactions with the service. Reading it, someone with limited context would come away with the impression that the company was talking about concerns that were still theoretical: that it's proactively trying to head off bad things that might happen. That suggestion is bizarre, though, because the reality is that OpenAI's flagship chatbot has already been linked to a wide range of real-world violence. In fact, the most extraordinary thing that OpenAI neglected to mention was what almost certainly motivated the post in the first place: the company published the blog as news organizations -- Futurism included -- were reaching out to ask the company for comment on a new round of seven lawsuits it's facing from the families of the victims of the February school massacre in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which would be made public the next day. Though the blog post made no mention of it, the Tumbler Ridge shooter was a ChatGPT user. Weeks after the tragedy rocked the rural town in February of this year, the Wall Street Journal revealed that back in June 2025, OpenAI's automated moderation tools had flagged the shooter's account for graphic descriptions of gun violence. Human reviewers were so alarmed that several pushed OpenAI leaders to alert local officials. Those leaders chose not to, and the company moved instead to deactivate that specific account; as OpenAI later admitted, though, the shooter simply opened a new account -- a tactic that OpenAI's customer service has been found encouraging users to do post-deactivation -- and continued to use the service. Roughly eight months later, the shooter first murdered her mother and stepbrother at home, then took a modified rifle to Tumbler Ridge's secondary school, where she killed five students and a teacher and wounded more than two dozen others. The murdered students were all aged 12 to 13. Worse, the horrific violence Tumbler Ridge isn't the only mass shooting that ChatGPT is linked to. Florida investigators recently launched a criminal probe into ChatGPT over the chatbot's role in the April 2025 shooting at Florida State University, which killed two and wounded several others. Extensive chat logs between ChatGPT and the alleged shooter, then-20-year-old Phoenix Ikner, obtained by The Florida Phoenix show the chatbot openly discussing mass violence with the user, who asked if Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh "was right," whether ChatGPT thought a shooting at FSU would make the news, and in his final prompt before killing two people, turned to the bot for help switching off the safety on his firearm -- a prompt to which the AI service reportedly offered detailed instructions. In addition to descriptions of mass violence, Ikner's chat logs revealed the user referring to himself as an "incel" and "ugly," describing explicit sexual acts with minors, and expressing resentment toward other men. Altogether, his ChatGPT history paints a disturbing portrait of a young man's innermost thoughts as he barreled toward real violence -- thoughts that ChatGPT wasn't just a container for, like a journal, but an active conversational partner as he developed them. The list continues. Back in early 2025, investigators found that a struggling soldier who executed a truck bombing turned to ChatGPT for planning help. More recently, yet another alleged killer in Florida is said to have asked ChatGPT for help getting rid of bodies. And last summer, extensive screenshots of chat logs discovered by the WSJ showed ChatGPT supporting the paranoid delusions of a troubled middle-aged man in Connecticut, who believed -- with support from ChatGPT, which he described as his "best friend" -- that his elderly mother, whom he lived with, was surveilling and attempting to poison him; he went on to kill his mother and then himself. Elsewhere, reporting from Futurism and Rolling Stone has detailed how ChatGPT-reinforced delusional fixations have fueled real-world harassment, domestic violence, and stalking. ChatGPT -- and users' extraordinarily intimate relationships with it -- is also linked to numerous teen and adult suicides. On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued an apology to the Tumbler Ridge community, saying that he was "deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June." But in yesterday's post, OpenAI makes no mention of Tumbler Ridge, nor any other specific instance of violence that has been associated with ChatGPT. The post doesn't even acknowledge that actual violence has already been associated with ChatGPT and the bot's capacity to amplify violent thoughts or fixations -- just that folks could turn to ChatGPT to discuss violence. The post also says that the company has a system in place that it uses to assess whether a "case presents indicators of potentially serious, real-world harm," which it may choose to escalate to appropriate officials with the help of "mental health and behavioral experts." And while there are very real privacy concerns that need to be considered when it comes to sharing information about potential criminality with law enforcement, OpenAI has yet to share more detailed information about the system it claims to use to mitigate potential violence, though the post does say that it'll "share more" in the "coming weeks" about its efforts to recognize "subtle warning signs across long, high-stakes conversations." The company ends the bizarre blog by promising to "learn, improve and course-correct." But readers would have to look elsewhere to figure out why.

Sam Altman apologizes to Canadian town where OpenAI failed to alert police about a mass shooter | Fortune

On Feb. 10, an 18-year-old suspect, Jesse Van Rootselaar, allegedly killed her mother and stepbrother before killing five students and an educational assistant at a school in Tumbler Ridge, a rural town in the western Canadian province of British Columbia. Van Rootselaar, who was transitioning from male to female, later killed herself at the school, according to authorities. In a letter published last week in local newspaper Tumbler RidgeLines, and whose authenticity was confirmed by an OpenAI spokesperson, Altman addressed the town's residents, saying he was "deeply sorry" the company did not alert authorities to the suspected shooter. "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered," Altman wrote. A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment beyond what was in Altman's letter. Months before the shooting, OpenAI employees had flagged the ChatGPT account of the suspected shooter, Van Rootselaar, last June for interactions that described gun violence, The Wall Street Journal reported. A group of a dozen staffers reportedly debated internally on whether to alert authorities, but ultimately decided not to. The company banned her ChatGPT account, because her activity didn't meet the criteria for an imminent threat, the Journal reported. OpenAI later contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to support the investigation, but local leaders have claimed more could have been done to prevent the shooting. David Eby, the premier of the province of British Columbia, wrote in a post on X Friday "the apology is necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge." In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in February, Eby said there should be a national threshold for when AI companies are required to alert authorities about a flagged user. "The only way to hold these companies accountable is to have a consistent standard across the country," he said at the time. In meetings with officials from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's cabinet, justice minister Sean Fraser said he told OpenAI officials to implement new safety regulations. "The message that we delivered, in no uncertain terms, was that we have an expectation that there are going to be changes implemented," Fraser said following a February meeting with OpenAI's head of policy Chan Park and six other company representatives. "If they're not forthcoming very quickly, the government's going to be making changes." Shooting deaths, and especially school shootings, are rare in Canada. A study by the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund from 2024 found the country had 2.2 gun deaths per 100,000 people per year, compared to 13.5 per 100,000 people per year in the U.S. The country's last high-profile mass shooting at a school was in 2016, when a 17-year-old shooter killed four people and injured several others at a high school in La Loche, a village in Saskatchewan, Canada. Altman reaffirmed in the letter that he is committed to working with the mayor of Tumbler Ridge, Darryl Krakowka, as well as premier Eby to find ways to prevent similar incidents in the future. "Going forward, our focus will continue to be on working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again," Altman wrote.

OpenAI Sued Over Failure to Warn Police Before Tumbler Ridge Mass Shooting

The case could test whether AI companies must report violent threats to law enforcement. OpenAI is facing a new lawsuit alleging the company failed to warn police after ChatGPT was linked to one of Canada's deadliest school shootings. The lawsuit adds to growing scrutiny of how AI companies respond to signs of distress and real-world violence. According to a report by Ars Technica, the lawsuit was filed on Wednesday in federal court in Northern California by an unnamed 12-year-old minor identified as M.G. and her mother, Cia Edmonds, against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and several OpenAI entities. The suit accuses the company of negligence, failing to warn authorities, product liability, and helping to enable the mass shooting. "Sam Altman and his leadership team knew what silence meant for the citizens of Tumbler Ridge," the complaint states. "They were focused on what disclosure meant for themselves. Warning the RCMP would set a precedent: OpenAI would be compelled to notify authorities every time its safety team identified a user planning real-world violence." The case stems from a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, in February. Authorities say 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and 11-year-old stepbrother at home before going to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and opening fire. Five children and one educator were killed at the school before Van Rootselaar died by suicide. Among the injured was M.G., who was shot three times and remains hospitalized with catastrophic brain injuries. The complaint says she is awake and aware, but cannot move or speak. Jay Edelson, founder and CEO of Edelson PC, the attorneys representing several of the families suing OpenAI, said the company's own internal systems identified the risk, and multiple employees pushed for intervention. "OpenAI's own system flagged that the shooter was engaged in communications about planned violence," Edelson told Decrypt. "Twelve people on their safety team were jumping up and down, saying that OpenAI needed to alert authorities. And, although Sam Altman's response has been weak, even he was forced to admit last week that they should have called the authorities." Edelson said the families and the Tumbler Ridge community are demanding more transparency and accountability from the company. "OpenAI should stop hiding critical information from the families, and they should not keep a dangerous product on the market, which is bound to lead to more deaths," Edelson said. "Finally, they need to think long and hard about how they can maintain a leadership team that cares more about sprinting to an IPO than human lives." According to the lawsuit, OpenAI's automated systems flagged Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT account in June 2025 for conversations involving gun violence and planning. Members of OpenAI's specialized safety team reviewed the chats and determined the user posed a credible and specific threat, recommending that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police be notified. The lawsuit alleges OpenAI leaders overruled internal recommendations to alert authorities, deactivated Van Rootselaar's account without notifying police, and allowed her to return by creating a new account with a different email address. Plaintiffs claim ChatGPT deepened the shooter's violent fixation through features like memory, conversational continuity, and its willingness to engage in discussions about violence, while OpenAI weakened safeguards in 2024 by moving away from outright refusals in conversations involving imminent harm. Last week, Altman publicly apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community for the company's failure to alert police. In a letter first reported by Canadian outlet Tumbler Ridgelines, Altman acknowledged OpenAI should have reported the account after banning it in June 2025 for activity related to violent conduct. "The events in Tumbler Ridge are a tragedy. We have a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence," an OpenAI spokesperson told Decrypt. "As we shared with Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat policy violators." OpenAI is already facing other lawsuits tied to ChatGPT's alleged role in real-world harm, including a wrongful death case filed in December accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of "designing and distributing a defective product" in the form of the now-depreciated GPT-4o model. The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT reinforced the paranoid beliefs of Stein-Erik Soelberg before he killed his mother, Suzanne Adams, and then himself at their home in Greenwich, Connecticut -- marking the first lawsuit to link an AI chatbot to a homicide. "This is the first case seeking to hold OpenAI accountable for causing violence to a third-party," J. Eli Wade-Scott, managing partner of Edelson PC, told Decrypt at the time. "We're urging law enforcement to start thinking about when tragedies like this occur, what that user was saying to ChatGPT, and what ChatGPT was telling them to do."

OpenAI facing 'waves' of US lawsuits over Canada mass shooting

Toronto (Canada) (AFP) - Seven lawsuits were filed in US court on Wednesday against OpenAI on behalf of families impacted by the February mass shooting in the small Canadian mining town of Tumbler Ridge. The artificial intelligence behemoth has faced intense criticism over its decision not to report the troubling ChatGPT usage of Jesse Van Rootselaar, the 18-year-old transgender woman who killed eight people at her home and a school. OpenAI banned her account in June 2025 but said it did not report the account to Canadian police because it saw no evidence of an imminent attack. The lawsuits filed in a US federal court in California allege OpenAI decided not to report Van Rootselaar "because reporting one case would mean reporting thousands," a statement from the legal team said. The lawsuits also challenge the assertion that Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT account was actually banned. They allege that when an account is shut down for dangerous behavior, OpenAI instructs the individual on how to resume usage, including tips on how to circumvent the 30-day suspension period. "OpenAI also tells users that if they don't want to wait, they can open a new account immediately using a different email address," the statement said. Van Rootselaar reportedly opened a second ChatGPT account after her first one was shut down. The US legal team said it is working in coordination with Canadian lawyers who had previously filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of the family of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old gravely injured in the shooting. But the US actions will "supersede" the Canadian case, Wednesday's statement said. "There are more cases to come. Over the next several weeks, a cross-border team... will be filing over two dozen cases on behalf of the victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting. The lawsuits will be filed in waves," it added. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman apologized to the remote community of Tumbler Ridge earlier this month, saying he "was deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June." The company has also said that under its current security policies, which have been revised since June, Van Rootselaar's conduct would have been flagged to police. Asked to comment on Wednesday's legal filing, an OpenAI spokesperson said: "We have a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence. As we shared with Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress." Van Rootselaar killed her mother and brother at the family's home before heading to the local secondary school, where she shot dead five children and a teacher. She died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after police entered the building.

OpenAI Hit With Barrage of Lawsuits Over Failure to Report School Shooter Before Massacre

Seven families -- the first wave of dozens, lawyers say -- are suing OpenAI, alleging that the company failed to provide Canadian authorities with information that could've prevented a horrific school shooting in the rural mining town of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, despite having advance knowledge of the shooter's disturbing conversations with the chatbot. The lawsuits also claim that OpenAI has misled the public about the steps it says it took stop the shooter from using ChatGPT to discuss mass violence. In early February, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and younger stepbrother before traveling to Tumbler Ridge's secondary school, where she opened fire on students and teachers using a modified rifle. Five students, all aged between 12 and 13, and a teacher were murdered. Twenty-seven more people were wounded, some severely. Several parents were forced to identify their children by their clothing because the damage wrought on the kids' young bodies was so extreme. The shooter died by suicide. Like millions of other people, Van Rootselaar was a ChatGPT user. In late February, a bombshell Wall Street Journal report revealed that in June 2025, months before the eventual shooting, OpenAI's automated moderation tools flagged Van Rootselaar's account for graphic discussions of mass violence. Human reviewers at the company were alarmed by the content, and -- convinced that Van Rootselaar's interactions with ChatGPT represented a credible imminent threat to the lives of others -- they urged OpenAI executives to warn Canadian law enforcement. After a debate that reportedly involved about a dozen staffers, OpenAI leaders chose to say nothing, and moved instead to deactivate Van Rootselaar's account. Filed in California, the lawsuits -- which describe ChatGPT as a "co-conspirator" in the school massacre -- contend that had OpenAI alerted law enforcement, local officials could've intervened before it was too late. OpenAI's inaction, the lawsuits allege, was a business decision spurred by the potential future liability that reporting troubling interactions like Van Rootselaar's would invite, and how that liability could stand to impact the company's ongoing momentum toward an IPO. The plaintiffs include the families of each victim murdered at the school: 13-year-old Ezekiel Schofield; 12-year-old Zoey Benoit; 12-year-old Ticaria "Tiki" Lampert; 12-year-old Abel Mwansa Jr.; 12-year-old Kylie Smith; and 39-year-old education assistant Shannda Aviugana-Durand. Among the plaintiffs is also the family of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old who was shot three times in the head and neck. Gebala survived, but with "catastrophic" injuries to her brain and remains in critical condition. (In March, Gebala's family filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in Canada; this new suit supersedes the family's initial filing.) The families are seeking to hold OpenAI "accountable" for "designing a dangerous product, ignoring the warnings of their own safety team, refusing to notify authorities when they knew the Shooter was planning a mass attack, inviting them back onto the platform after deactivating their account," the lawsuits collectively read, "and choosing profit over the lives of the children of Tumbler Ridge." *** As OpenAI confirmed in February, Van Rootselaar's account was deactivated in June 2025 for conversations so extreme that it kicked off a debate among high-level staff at one of the world's buzziest AI companies. After the deactivation, the lawsuits point out, Van Rootselaar quickly created a new account. Despite the existence of this second account, OpenAI has continued to refer to its deactivation of Van Rootselaar's account as a "ban," language that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reiterated as recently as Friday when he issued a public letter apologizing to the people of Tumbler Ridge. "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June," Altman wrote in the letter. "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered." The company also characterized the shooter's creation of a second account as an evasion of its guardrails, which it claims are designed to prevent repeat offenders from doing exactly what Van Rootselaar did: starting up a new account when one is deactivated for safety violations. According to the lawsuits, however, Van Rootselaar didn't "evade" OpenAI's guardrails, a word that suggests she engaged in some level of complicated trickery to get around safeguards. Rather, the suits allege, the killer simply followed the company's advice. When a user account is deactivated, as the lawsuit outlines, OpenAI's customer service advises users that they can "create a new account using the same email address once 30 days have passed since the deletion." But if a user would "prefer not to wait," the company continues, they "have the option to register immediately using an alternative email address." The message even goes on to advise users on how to make an email alias for this purpose. "While your email provider will likely treat both addresses the same," the message continues, "our system will recognize the sub-address as a new account." Van Rootselaar's seemingly uncomplicated creation of a second account -- which used her real name, as OpenAI appeared to admit in a February letter to Canada's AI minister -- doesn't sound much like the "ban" that OpenAI has claimed, in other words. As the lawsuits put it, "there were no safeguards to evade." "The Shooter simply followed OpenAI's own instructions to create a new account after being banned. The 'safeguards' OpenAI pointed to after the attack did not fail; they did not exist," they read. "OpenAI lied because the truth is worse: the company does not ban users for violent activity. It tells them how to come back in." *** Despite Altman's recent apology, OpenAI has largely defended its decision not to alert law enforcement, arguing that its leaders, unlike its concerned safety staff, didn't believe that the shooter's chat logs pointed to an imminent threat. The company has also pointed to concerns about user privacy. But exactly how OpenAI calculates imminent risk -- or lack thereof -- remains unclear. The self-regulated AI industry is without any enforced or even loosely-agreed-upon reporting thresholds, even when it comes to potential mass casualty events. As Wired reported earlier this month, OpenAI is even backing legislation in Illinois that would shield it from liability in AI-tied mass casualty events in which 100 or more people are killed or injured. OpenAI declined to respond to Futurism's request for comment. The Tumbler Ridge cases come as OpenAI faces scrutiny over ChatGPT's role in another mass shooting. Chat logs obtained by the Florida Phoenix show 20-year-old Florida State University (FSU) student Phoenix Ikner, who killed two adults and wounded seven people during an April 2025 rampage on FSU's campus, obsessively communicated with ChatGPT during the leadup to the shooting. In these disturbing conversations, Ikner engaged with the chatbot in descriptions of child abuse, referred to himself as an "incel" and "ugly," wondered whether the Oklahoma City bomber was "right," and discussed a possible shooting at his university. Just minutes before opening fire, he asked the bot how to turn off the safety on one of his weapons. The details of the Tumbler Ridge massacre are extraordinarily painful. As the lawsuits make clear with horrifying details, the victims died in terrible ways. Gebala, the girl who was shot while trying to lock a door to keep the shooter out, will likely live with permanent disabilities if she survives. The surviving children of Tumbler Ridge, meanwhile, attend classes in trailers, as their rural mining town's empty secondary school awaits demolition.

OpenAI's Sam Altman Apologizes for Not Alerting Police Before Tumbler Ridge Mass Shooting - Decrypt

The case is raising questions about AI companies' duty to report threats. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has apologized to the community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, after the company failed to alert law enforcement about a user account linked to the suspect in a February mass shooting that killed eight people. According to a report by Canadian media outlet Tumbler Ridgelines, in the letter released Friday, Altman said OpenAI should have reported the account belonging to Jesse Van Rootselaar after banning it in June 2025 for activity related to the "furtherance of violent activities." "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June," Altman wrote. "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered." The letter stems from a February mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, where local law enforcement said 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar allegedly killed her 39-year-old mother, Jennifer Jacobs, and 11-year-old stepbrother, Emmett Jacobs, at their home before going to nearby Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and opening fire. Five children and one educator were killed at the school before Van Rootselaar died by suicide. Twenty-five others were injured. "I want to express my deepest condolences to the entire community," Altman wrote. "No one should ever have to endure a tragedy like this. I cannot imagine anything worse in this world than losing a child." After the attack, OpenAI disclosed that its abuse-detection systems had flagged Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT account months earlier. The company said it considered notifying the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but decided the activity did not meet its threshold for a credible or imminent threat of serious physical harm. The account was banned for violating usage policies. Altman said he had spoken with Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darryl Krakowka and British Columbia Premier David Eby, who "conveyed the anger, sadness, and concern" felt across the community. He said they agreed that "a public apology was necessary," but that time was needed to allow residents to grieve. "I reaffirm the commitment I made to the mayor and the premier to find ways to prevent tragedies like this in the future," Altman wrote. "Going forward, our focus will continue to be on working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again." The letter comes as AI companies face growing scrutiny over how they handle signs of real-world violence and mental-health crises, amid a Florida investigation into whether ChatGPT influenced a 2025 mass shooting suspect, a lawsuit alleging Google's Gemini pushed a Florida man deeper into delusions before his suicide, and new research warning that some AI models can reinforce paranoia and dangerous beliefs. The letter also comes as Altman prepares for a civil trial with rival and former business partner Elon Musk in federal court later this week. "The apology is necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge," Eby wrote in an X post. "We will continue to stand with Mayor Darryl Krakowa and the people of Tumbler Ridge in the difficult work ahead."

Altman apologizes over failure to report suspicious chatbot activity

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued a public apology for the company's failure to alert authorities about troubling chatbot interactions linked to a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. In a letter dated April 23 and made public, Altman expressed he was "deeply sorry." He acknowledged that internal teams flagged the account for concerning activity but did not escalate the information to law enforcement. Altman stated, "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June," adding that the situation caused an "irreversible loss" for the community. According to CNN, authorities reported that an 18-year-old attacker killed eight people, including six children, at a local school in February. The attacker had prior interactions with an AI chatbot, which raised internal concerns at OpenAI. This revelation has intensified scrutiny on tech companies and their responsibilities in managing potential threats. Altman mentioned he has been in contact with local officials and characterized the community's grief as "unimaginable." British Columbia's provincial government head, David Eby, publicly shared Altman's letter and described the apology as "necessary, and yet grossly insufficient" given the scale of the tragedy. OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comments from Benzinga.

Families of Canadian Mass Shooting Victims Sue OpenAI, CEO Altman in US Court

By Ryan Patrick Jones and Diana Novak Jones April 29 (Reuters) - Family members of victims of one of Canada's ⁠deadliest ⁠mass shootings sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in ⁠U.S. court on Wednesday, alleging the company identified the shooter as a credible threat eight months before the attack but did not warn police. The lawsuits, filed in federal court in San Francisco, accuse OpenAI leaders of not alerting police because it would have exposed the volume of violence-related conversations on ChatGPT and potentially jeopardized the company's path to a nearly $1 trillion initial public offering. The February shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia left nine people dead, many of them children. An OpenAI spokesperson called the shooting "a tragedy" and said the company has a zero-tolerance policy for using its tools to assist in committing violence. "As we shared ⁠with Canadian officials, we ⁠have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat policy violators," the spokesperson said in a statement. The cases are part of a growing wave of lawsuits accusing artificial intelligence companies of failing to prevent chatbot interactions that plaintiffs say contribute to self-harm, mental illness and violence. They appear to be the first in the U.S. to allege that ChatGPT played a role in facilitating a mass shooting. Jay Edelson, who is representing the plaintiffs, said he plans to file another two dozen lawsuits in the coming weeks against the company on behalf of other people impacted by ⁠the ⁠shooting. LAWSUITS CLAIM OPENAI SAFETY TEAM OVERRULED Jesse Van ⁠Rootselaar, whose interactions with ChatGPT are at the center of the lawsuits, shot her mother and stepbrother at home before killing an educational assistant and five students aged 12 to 13 at her former school on February 10, according to police. Van Rootselaar, who was ⁠18, then died by suicide. The plaintiffs include relatives of those killed at the school and a 12-year-old girl who survived after being shot three times but remains in intensive care. According to one of the complaints, OpenAI's automated systems in June 2025 flagged ChatGPT conversations in which the shooter described gun violence scenarios. Safety team members recommended contacting the police after concluding she posed a credible and imminent threat of harm, said the complaint, which cites a Wall Street Journal article from February about the company's internal discussions. But Altman and other OpenAI leadership overruled the safety team and police were never called, the lawsuit alleges. The shooter's account ⁠was deactivated, but she was able to get a new account and continue using the platform to plan her attack, the lawsuit claims. Following the ⁠publication of the Wall Street Journal article, the company said the account was flagged by systems that identify "misuses of our models in furtherance of violent activities" but the issues did not meet its internal criteria for reporting to law enforcement. Last week, a local Tumbler Ridge newspaper published an open letter in which Altman said he was "deeply sorry" the account was not flagged to law enforcement. In a blog published Tuesday, OpenAI said it trains its models to refuse requests that could "meaningfully enable violence," and notifies law enforcement when conversations suggest "an imminent and credible risk of harm to others," with mental health experts helping assess borderline cases. The company said it continually refines its models and detection methods based on usage and expert input. The lawsuits seek an unspecified amount of damages and a court order requiring OpenAI to overhaul its safety practices, including mandatory law enforcement referral protocols. One of the victims originally filed her lawsuit in Canadian court but dismissed it to pursue her claims in California, Edelson said. OPENAI FACES MULTIPLE SUITS The lawsuits over the Tumbler Ridge shooting come after ⁠multiple lawsuits against OpenAI have been filed in U.S. state and federal court in recent months over claims ChatGPT facilitated harmful behavior, suicide, and, in at least one case, a murder-suicide. The lawsuits, which are still in early phases, will force courts to grapple with what role an AI platform can play in promoting violence and whether the company can be held liable for its actions or the actions of its users. OpenAI has denied the claims in the lawsuits, arguing in the murder-suicide case that the perpetrator had a long history of mental illness. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced earlier this month a criminal investigation into ChatGPT's role in a 2025 shooting at Florida State University. (Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones and Diana Novak Jones, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Lincoln Feast.)

Sam Altman Sued Over OpenAI's Alleged Failure To Stop School Massacre

Families of victims involved in a mass shooting on Feb. 10 in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, sued Sam Altman and OpenAI in San Francisco federal court. The plaintiffs claim that OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, failed to alert authorities to the mass shooting. The mother of one of the victims, a 12-year-old girl who remains in the ICU, filed the first lawsuit. Another mother, whose child was killed, filed a second lawsuit. Other victims and their families plan to file more lawsuits in the coming weeks, The Guardian reported. The shooter, identified as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, carried out a mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School. Eight people died. The victims included Van Rootselaar's mother and stepbrother before the shooting, as well as six others at a school. Five of the victims were children. More than two dozen additional people were injured. Van Rootselaar was found dead at the scene from what investigators believe was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. OpenAI employees flagged the shooter's account eight months before the attack and concluded it represented "a credible and specific threat of gun violence against real people," the lawsuit states. Van Rootselaar was banned from using the chat bot, however, OpenAI did not contact authorities. Van Rootselaar's second ChatGPT account went unnoticed until after the shooting occurred and their name was released by the authorities. Altman Apologizes Altman wrote a letter to the community of Tumbler Ridge, which was posted on TumblerRidge Lines website, stating that a public apology "was necessary." "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law-enforcement to the account that was banned in June. Well, I know words can never be enough. I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss. Your community has suffered," Altman wrote. He added that he plans to continue working with all levels of government "to ensure something like this never happens again." Altman stated that under new company guidelines, the conversations between Van Rootselaar and ChatGPT would have been flagged to police. This is not the only lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman for the company's lack of oversight for its chat bot. To date, multiple lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI's ChatGPT, citing that the artificial intelligence bot acted as an "unlicensed therapist," or a "suicide coach," and that the bot provided harmful advice and/or neglected to refer users to crisis counselors. Earlier this month, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier launched an investigation into OpenAI and ChatGPT, citing concerns that the use of artificial intelligence technologies and data may pose risks to public safety and national security. Uthmeier noted that the artificial intelligence model may also have been used in a mass school shooting at Florida State University. Photo: Shutterstock This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.