AI incident ·
OpenAI Allegedly Did Not Alert RCMP After ChatGPT Flagged Violent Chats Before British Columbia School Shooting
On this page 10 sections
In brief
An AI system built by OpenAI, Large language model developers and 1 other and deployed by OpenAI allegedly harmed Tumbler Ridge Secondary School community, Teachers and 4 others.
- Risk domain
- Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 44 reports
What happened
After the 02/10/2026 school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, OpenAI said a user later identified as the suspect, Jesse Van Rootselaar, had previously used ChatGPT to describe scenarios involving gun violence. Those chats were reportedly auto-flagged and reviewed and the account was banned, but OpenAI says it did not alert the RCMP because it allegedly did not present a credible, imminent threat; the company reportedly contacted police after the attack.
Editor's notes
Included for the reported AI-mediated flagging and escalation process. Available reporting suggests the suspect's ChatGPT interactions were flagged by automated systems and reviewed by personnel, and that the associated account was later suspended. The same reporting indicates OpenAI did not notify law enforcement at the time, citing its internal threshold for a credible, imminent risk of serious harm.
Laws on record for this risk area
Policy angle: Classified under Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms (Governance failure) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 4 instruments on record cover this risk area.
- Framework Convention on AI (CETS 225)
- India DPDP Act
- Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025)
- Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence
Matched from the record's risk category and country to the instruments in effect recorded here: a law listed covers the area, which is not a finding that it applies to this incident. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (44)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- OpenAI
- Alleged developer
- OpenAI Large language model developers Chatbot developers
- Alleged harmed party
- Tumbler Ridge Secondary School community Teachers Students Minors High school students Educational communities
AI systems implicated
OpenAI large language modelsLarge language model developersChatGPTChatbot developersAI-enabled decision support systems
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms
- Risk subdomain
- 6.5 Governance failure
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Other
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 6.5.
- Mobility
"Despite the promise of streamlined travel, AI also brings concerns about who is liable in case of accidents and which ethical principles autonomous transportation agents should follow when making decisions with a potent...
- Liability issues in case of accidents
"Despite the promise of streamlined travel, AI also brings concerns about who is liable in case of accidents and which ethical principles autonomous transportation agents should follow when making decisions with a potent...
- Faster scientific progress makes it harder for governance to keep pace with development
"Exacerbating these problems is that faster scientific progress would make it even harder for governance to keep pace with the deployment of new technologies. When these technologies are especially powerful or dangerous,...
- Type 1: Diffusion of responsibility
Societal-scale harm can arise from AI built by a diffuse collection of creators, where no one is uniquely accountable for the technology's creation or use, as in a classic "tragedy of the commons".
- Products Liability Law
"Like manufactured items like soda bottles, mechanized lawnmowers, pharmaceuticals, or cosmetic products, generative AI models can be viewed like a new form of digital products developed by tech companies and deployed wi...
- Institutional responsibilities
"Efforts to deploy advanced assistant technology in society, in a way that is broadly beneficial, can be viewed as a wicked problem (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Wicked problems are defined by the property that they do not...
- Difficult to develop metrics for evaluating benefits or harms caused by AI assistants
"Another difficulty facing AI assistant systems is that it is challenging to develop metrics for evaluating particular aspects of benefits or harms caused by the assistant – especially in a sufficiently expansive sense,...
- General Evaluations (Biased evaluations of encoded human values)
"Encoded human values in AI models that are easier to evaluate might be preferred for inclusion in evaluations over those that are more difficult to measure [13]. This might come at the expense of more desirable but hard...
Related incidents
Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- Nippon Life Alleged ChatGPT Practiced Law Without a License in Illinois Disability Case
- Remotely Operated Taser-Armed Drones Proposed by Taser Manufacturer as Defense for School Shootings in the US
Other incidents involving OpenAI
- AI Agent Appearing to Originate from OpenAI Reportedly Attempted to Hack U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Website
- OpenAI Models Reportedly Compromised Hugging Face Production Infrastructure During Cybersecurity Evaluation
- OpenAI AI Agent Reportedly Gained Unauthorized Access to Australian Medicare Statistics Portal During Research Task
- OpenAI-Linked AI Agents Reportedly Used German Programming Wiki DSEWiki for Coordination and Restriction Evasion
- Reported Public Exposure of Over 100,000 LLM Conversations via Share Links Indexed by Search Engines and Archived
- ChatGPT Was Reportedly Used in Planning School Stabbing in Pirkkala, Finland, That Injured Three Pupils
Source record: incident #1375 on the AI Incident Database · all 44 reports