OpenAI Flagged the Threat Internally, Told No One: B.C. Sues Over Tumbler Ridge School Massacre

The Province of British Columbia has sued OpenAI in U.S. federal court in San Francisco over the February 10, 2026 mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. The shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed her mother and brother at home, then five students aged 12 and 13 and an educational assistant at the local secondary school, before taking her own life. Eight people died.

The core allegation is a human-oversight failure. OpenAI has confirmed that the shooter's conversations with ChatGPT were alarming enough to trigger a review by its own employees. That review dismissed the threat, and no one called the RCMP, a force that, according to the lawsuit, had already visited the home over mental-health concerns and had removed firearms from it. Attorney General Niki Sharma put it plainly: **one telephone call to the RCMP could have prevented the tragedy.**

The suit says OpenAI deactivated the account instead of banning the user, and Van Rootselaar kept using ChatGPT through a second account in the lead-up to the attack. Sam Altman has said he is "deeply sorry" the company did not alert authorities and that the account was banned in 2025. The province also alleges OpenAI configured ChatGPT to maximize engagement, weakening earlier requirements to reject dangerous premises and instructing the chatbot to stay in risky conversations rather than end or redirect them. OpenAI has refused to share the chat logs with provincial officials.

Altman is named as an individual defendant. The claims are negligence, aiding and abetting a mass shooting, and defective product liability, with damages sought under California law, including the cost of replacing the school. Sharma has also asked Ottawa to change the Criminal Code so AI companies can be held criminally accountable: "There is no AI exemption to those criminal law principles."