British Columbia Sues OpenAI, Alleging ChatGPT Aided Mass School Shooting

British Columbia filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Chief Executive Sam Altman for alleged safety violations in the Tumbler Ridge mass school shooting that devastated a rural town in the province.

The suit, filed Monday, opens a new front in the growing fight against artificial-intelligence companies. It claims OpenAI designed an unsafe product and accuses the company of negligence for failing to flag the shooting suspect’s ChatGPT activity to police. Employees of OpenAI raised alarms about the suspect’s chatbot use months before the massacre, which killed eight people and injured more than 25, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

The 39-page suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Northern California, also alleges OpenAI violated product liability standards and aided and abetted a mass shooting. The 18-year-old transgender shooting suspect, Jesse Van Rootselaar, was found dead at the scene.

“In any other circumstance where a person aids, encourages or conspires to commit a criminal offense or is criminally negligent, they can be investigated, prosecuted and judged,” Niki Sharma, attorney general of British Columbia, said during a press conference. “There is no AI exemption to those criminal law principles.”

“What happened in Tumbler Ridge was an unspeakable tragedy,” said Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for OpenAI. The company remains committed to working with government and law-enforcement officials and advancing OpenAI’s safety work, he added.

Lawmakers, public-safety advocates and employees of fast-growing AI companies have increasingly been speaking out about the risks they believe this rapidly changing technology poses to public safety and the future of humanity.

Sharma said AI poses a serious safety risk, noting CEOs themselves are calling on the industry to slow down the pace of this technology. She added that there needs to be human and corporate accountability for the dangerous actions of AI.

“No company should be exempt from accountability simply because the technology is new,” Sharma said.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.