British Columbia Sues OpenAI Over Shooting

British Columbia has sued OpenAI in a U.S. federal court over the company’s failure to warn police about ChatGPT activity it had already flagged before Jessie Van Rootselaar killed eight people, including six children, at a school in Tumbler Ridge in February.

Attorney General Niki Sharma said the claim, filed on Monday in California – where, she argued, the decision not to report was taken, asks what technology firms must do “when they become aware of credible threats of serious violence.” Families of those killed or injured have already brought their own cases. Any damages the province wins, Sharma told reporters, would go toward rebuilding the secondary school.

Media reporting established that OpenAI’s safety team had marked Van Rootselaar’s account for references to gun violence months before the attack and did not tell local authorities. In April chief executive Sam Altman wrote to the families: “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement.” Sharma said on Monday that OpenAI had still not taken “meaningful steps” to meet survivors and the town, and still had a chance to tighten safeguards and be more open. She had not read the chats. “We have asked OpenAI to disclose these chats. They have refused. We should all be asking them: Why?” The BBC asked the company for a response to the new suit.

The lawsuit does not retry what happened in February. It asks whether OpenAI, having already marked a user’s ChatGPT activity as a warning about gun violence, had a duty to tell police and whether that duty still applies when the logs sit on servers in another country. Eight people were killed in Tumbler Ridge, a small town in northern British Columbia. British Columbia has taken that failure, as it sees it, to a federal court in California.