British Columbia has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, alleging the artificial intelligence company failed to notify police after its ChatGPT chatbot was used to plan a mass shooting that killed eight people in the northern B.C. community of Tumbler Ridge, Reuters reported Monday.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, alleges OpenAI’s safety team flagged conversations between the chatbot and the eventual shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar, in June 2025, eight months before the attack, but that company leadership rejected a recommendation to alert law enforcement, according to Reuters, which cited court filings.
Van Rootselaar, 18, a former student, killed her mother and a sibling at home on Feb. 10 before going to a secondary school in Tumbler Ridge, a small community in northeastern B.C., where she killed five students, aged 12 and 13, and an educational assistant, according to Reuters and CBC News. She then died by suicide.
British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma said the lawsuit marks “an important step toward seeking justice for the families, students, educators and community members whose lives were forever changed,” according to Al Jazeera. Sharma said the case underscores “the urgent need for strong national safeguards for artificial intelligence technologies.”
The province’s suit seeks compensation for the costs of the emergency response and community recovery, as well as a court order requiring OpenAI to overhaul how it identifies and responds to threats raised in ChatGPT conversations, Reuters and Al Jazeera reported.
Altman posted an apology in April, saying he was “deeply sorry” that OpenAI had not contacted authorities after its safety systems flagged the shooter’s messages, but the company had not by Monday made the reforms it promised, according to Reuters.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri called the shooting “an unspeakable tragedy” and said the company remains committed to improving how its systems detect and respond to signs of potential violence, Reuters reported. OpenAI has said it trains its models to refuse requests that could “meaningfully enable violence.”
More than 30 other lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI by victims’ families and survivors of the Tumbler Ridge shooting, according to Reuters.
British Columbia’s suit is believed to be the first legal action brought directly by a Canadian provincial government against an artificial intelligence company over its alleged role in a mass-casualty event, though it follows a wave of similar litigation in the United States targeting AI chatbot makers over their interactions with users before acts of violence or self-harm.
Tumbler Ridge, a community of roughly 2,000 people about 1,200 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, has been holding memorial events in the months since the shooting, one of the deadliest attacks at a Canadian school in decades.
OpenAI has not filed a formal response to the province’s claims. A hearing date has not yet been set.
