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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote a letter publicly apologizing to residents of the Canadian town of Tumbler Ridge after the company failed to alert local authorities about a person who allegedly killed eight people in the town earlier this year.
On Feb. 10, an 18-year-old suspect, Jesse Van Rootselaar, allegedly killed her mother and stepbrother before killing five students and an educational assistant at a school in Tumbler Ridge, a rural town in the western Canadian province of British Columbia. Van Rootselaar, who was transitioning from male to female, later killed herself at the school, according to authorities.
In a letter published last week in local newspaper Tumbler RidgeLines, and whose authenticity was confirmed by an OpenAI spokesperson, Altman addressed the town’s residents, saying he was “deeply sorry” the company did not alert authorities to the suspected shooter.
“While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered,” Altman wrote.
A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment beyond what was in Altman’s letter.
Months before the shooting, OpenAI employees had flagged the ChatGPT account of the suspected shooter, Van Rootselaar, last June for interactions that described gun violence, The Wall Street Journal reported. A group of a dozen staffers reportedly debated internally on whether to alert authorities, but ultimately decided not to. The company banned her ChatGPT account, because her activity didn’t meet the criteria for an imminent threat, the Journal reported.
OpenAI later contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to support the investigation, but local leaders have claimed more could have been done to prevent the shooting.
David Eby, the premier of the province of British Columbia, wrote in a post on X Friday “the apology is necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge.”
In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in February, Eby said there should be a national threshold for when AI companies are required to alert authorities about a flagged user.
“The only way to hold these companies accountable is to have a consistent standard across the country,” he said at the time.
In meetings with officials from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet, justice minister Sean Fraser said he told OpenAI officials to implement new safety regulations.
“The message that we delivered, in no uncertain terms, was that we have an expectation that there are going to be changes implemented,” Fraser said following a February meeting with OpenAI’s head of policy Chan Park and six other company representatives. “If they’re not forthcoming very quickly, the government’s going to be making changes.”
Shooting deaths, and especially school shootings, are rare in Canada. A study by the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund from 2024 found the country had 2.2 gun deaths per 100,000 people per year, compared to 13.5 per 100,000 people per year in the U.S. The country’s last high-profile mass shooting at a school was in 2016, when a 17-year-old shooter killed four people and injured several others at a high school in La Loche, a village in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Altman reaffirmed in the letter that he is committed to working with the mayor of Tumbler Ridge, Darryl Krakowka, as well as premier Eby to find ways to prevent similar incidents in the future.
“Going forward, our focus will continue to be on working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again,” Altman wrote.
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