OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has apologized to the community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, for failing to alert law enforcement about a woman who displayed troubling behavior on ChatGPT and later shot and killed eight people in the town and injured 25 others.
The February shooting was one of the deadliest in recent Canadian history. The killer, Jesse Van Rootselaar, had her ChatGPT account suspended for misuse in June, but OpenAI did not refer the case to authorities at the time.
“I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June,” Altman wrote in an April 23 letter addressed to the people of the town and published by local news site Tumbler RidgeLine. “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.”
Going forward, Altman said that OpenAI would be “working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, roughly a dozen staff at OpenAI had debated internally whether to alert authorities after OpenAI’s automated system had flagged her activity, which included describing various gun violence scenarios. In February, a spokeswoman for OpenAI confirmed that the company had flagged Van Rootselaar’s account but determined that her use of the tool did not meet the necessary criteria for escalating the matter to law enforcement, meaning it did not constitute a credible and imminent risk of serious physical harm to others.
Earlier this month, Florida’s attorney general launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI, alleging that the chatbot helped to plan a mass shooting at Florida State University that killed two people in 2025. According to The Washington Post, Attorney General James Uthmeier alleged that ChatGPT advised the shooter on “what type of gun to use, which ammo went with which gun, whether or not a gun would be useful at short range.”
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In the Florida case, OpenAI told the Post the shooting was “a tragedy,” but the chatbot was not responsible and merely provided factual responses with information “that could be found anywhere on the internet.”
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
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