A province sues in a California court
British Columbia filed suit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, in federal court in San Francisco on Monday, over the company’s handling of conversations that preceded a mass shooting at a school in the province in February. It is the first time a Canadian province has taken an AI company to court over a violent crime.
Eight people were killed at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School on 10 February, in a community of roughly 2,000 people in northern British Columbia. The shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Two claims
The province’s case rests on two arguments, according to Al Jazeera: that OpenAI failed to notify law enforcement about violent threats made on ChatGPT before the attack, and that it designed and sold an unsafe product.
The conversations date from 2025. OpenAI banned the account after finding the content but did not report it to police, Techcouver reported. OpenAI has confirmed that the exchange was alarming enough to trigger an internal review by its own staff. That review never reached the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
What the province wants
British Columbia is asking for money — the cost of the emergency response and of the community’s recovery — and for court orders forcing OpenAI to overhaul the way it identifies and handles conversations that threaten violence.
Attorney General Niki Sharma went further than the filing. She called for amendments to Canada’s Criminal Code to create what she described as a pathway to human accountability for the actions of AI, which would move the question out of the courts and into federal law.
More than thirty cases in the same court
The province joins a crowded docket. More than 30 lawsuits brought by families, survivors, students and school staff are already before the same California federal court. Altman wrote to the community in April saying he was deeply sorry the company had not contacted law enforcement, and promised changes. The province’s filing argues those changes were not made.
What to watch
Three things. Whether a US federal court will let a foreign provincial government recover public costs from an American company. Whether the cases are consolidated, which would put a single judge in charge of the central question of what a model provider owes the police. And whether the duty British Columbia is asking for — a private company reporting a user to law enforcement — is something a court will impose at all, or something a legislature will have to write.
