TORONTO: The family of a girl gravely injured during a mass shooting in Canada is suing OpenAI over the company’s failure to notify police about the killer’s troubling activity on its ChatGPT chatbot, lawyers said Tuesday (Mar 10).
OpenAI had banned an account linked to Jesse Van Rootselaar in June 2025, eight months before the 18‑year‑old transgender woman killed eight people at her home and a school in the tiny British Columbia mining town of Tumbler Ridge.
The account was banned over concerns about usage linked to violent activity, but OpenAI has said it did not inform police because nothing pointed towards an imminent attack.
Lawyers representing the family of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old who remains in hospital following the shooting, said in a statement that they were suing OpenAI over allegations of negligence.
“The purpose of this lawsuit is to learn the whole truth about how and why the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting happened, to impose accountability, to seek redress for harms and losses, and to help prevent another mass-shooting atrocity in Canada,” the firm of Rice, Parsons, Leoni, and Elliot said.
It said the suit centres on “extremely serious, though unproven, allegations against the American technology firm.”