OpenAI considered alerting Canadian police about school shooting suspect months ago
Summary
OpenAI detected a user account (Jesse Van Rootselaar) engaged in behavior suggesting violent activities through its abuse detection system, but decided the account activity did not meet the threshold for reporting to law enforcement because there was no imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm. Months later, the same person committed a school shooting in British Columbia that killed eight people, after which OpenAI retroactively contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with information about the account and its usage.
Classification
Affected Vendors
Related Issues
Original source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/21/tumbler-ridge-shooter-chatgpt-openai
First tracked: February 21, 2026 at 07:00 AM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 85%