The Canadian province of British Columbia sued OpenAI in the United States on Monday over February’s mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, which left eight people dead, including five students at the local secondary school, according to The New York Times and The Canadian Press.

Attorney General Niki Sharma said the company failed to warn police about alarming interactions between the shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, and the ChatGPT chatbot, and that OpenAI refused to show those conversations to provincial officials who asked for them. The claim, filed in US district court in San Francisco, names founder and chief executive Sam Altman as an individual defendant and accuses the defendants of negligence, ‘aiding and abetting a mass shooting’ and liability for a defective product; it seeks a jury trial and damages to rebuild the town’s secondary school. ‘One telephone call to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) could have prevented the tragedy,’ the lawsuit states. Sharma said she has written to federal officials asking for changes to Canada’s Criminal Code so that artificial intelligence (AI) companies can be held accountable for criminal conduct arising from their technologies. Survivors and witnesses are suing OpenAI separately, and the company has said it banned the shooter’s account in June 2025 but that the content did not meet the threshold to report it to authorities, according to CBC.