Nearly eight months after a teenage mass shooter killed eight people, including six children, in the small Canadian town of Tumbler Ridge, the western province of British Columbia has launched a federal lawsuit against artificial intelligence giant OpenAI, accusing the company of failing to alert law enforcement to alarming user activity on its flagship ChatGPT platform before the attack.
The 18-year-old perpetrator, Jessie Van Rootselaar, carried out the fatal mass shooting in February this year. Multiple independent media investigations later confirmed that OpenAI’s internal safety moderation team had already flagged concerning content referencing gun violence on Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account months before the attack, but senior company leadership failed to pass this credible threat of severe violence on to Canadian law enforcement authorities.
British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma announced the lawsuit, which was filed Monday in a California federal court. The province has chosen to file the case in the U.S. because the internal decision to withhold the threat information from authorities was made at OpenAI’s headquarters in California, Sharma confirmed, per reporting from Agence France-Presse.
In a formal public statement, Sharma emphasized that the legal action raises critical questions about the accountability obligations that large technology firms must uphold when they encounter verified threats of deadly harm on their platforms. “To date, OpenAI has not taken meaningful steps to address the concerns raised by survivors, families and the Tumbler Ridge community,” Sharma wrote. She added that the company still has a chance to demonstrate real accountability by strengthening its user safety safeguards, boosting operational transparency around threat reporting, and implementing concrete policy changes to stop similar tragedies from occurring in the future.
Sharma told reporters on Monday that provincial officials have not been able to review the full content of Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT conversations, because OpenAI has repeatedly rejected official requests to disclose the full chat logs. “We have asked OpenAI to disclose these chats. They have refused. We should all be asking them: Why?” Sharma said, according to Canadian public broadcaster CBC.
The attorney general also confirmed that any financial damages awarded to the province through the lawsuit will be allocated entirely to rebuilding the local secondary school impacted by the attack.
OpenAI has already acknowledged its failure to report the threat in the months after the shooting. In April, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued a public apology to the victims’ families in an open letter, writing, “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement.” The families of those killed and injured in the shooting have already filed separate private civil lawsuits against OpenAI. The British Broadcasting Corporation has reached out to OpenAI to request comment on the new provincial lawsuit, and as of Tuesday, the company had not issued a public response to the legal filing.