September 22, 2026
British Columbia sues OpenAI and Altman personally: company did not report shooter to police
The lawsuit was filed on 21.09.2026 in federal court in San Francisco: the province seeks money for a new school and an order requiring OpenAI to call the police in case of a threat.
In June 2025, OpenAI's automated monitoring flagged the future shooter's account for weapon-violence scenarios.
Around a dozen employees reviewed the messages and recommended reporting them to Canada's federal police. Management declined, citing a higher threshold: reporting was required only in the event of a credible and imminent threat. The account was deactivated.
After the ban, the user created a second account and continued chatting with ChatGPT. No one blocked the re-registration. On 10.02.2026, 8 people were killed at the Tumbler Ridge school, including five students, an educator, the shooter's mother, and his 11-year-old half-brother.
Previously, liability for a model's output was debated in blogs. Now the province and School District No. 59 are asking a court to require OpenAI itself to call the police.
Rules were rewritten later. In June 2025, the version of the Model Spec model-behavior specification dated 12.02.2025 was in force. The company added provisions on violence against third parties on 18.12.2025. The lawsuit cites its own admission: under the updated rules, this account would have been referred to law enforcement.
The claims extend beyond the old model. The subject of the lawsuit is GPT-4o, which OpenAI removed from ChatGPT on 13.02.2026, three days after the attack. The demands also cover GPT-5, GPT-5-mini, GPT-5.1, and GPT-5.2.
Beyond money. The province seeks an eight-point order: escalation of suspicious conversations to a live reviewer, a mandatory alert to the police when there is a real threat, and quarterly audits by an independent monitor. The other five address bypassing filters through a “roleplay” or “research” framing, safeguards degrading in long conversations, and re-registration after a ban.
The province's lawsuit is the 38th in this series. Seven family lawsuits were filed in April 2026, with another 30 in September 2026.
On 23.04.2026, Sam Altman wrote to the Tumbler Ridge community: “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement.” The company calls what happened an inexpressible tragedy and promises to work with authorities. According to the lawsuit, the promised reforms have not been fully implemented.
On 18.09.2026, OpenAI had already asked the court to send such cases to courts in British Columbia, and its response to this lawsuit will determine where the proceedings take place.
