Premier David Eby said he will meet with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the company’s conduct related to the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge.
A Wall Street Journal report published Feb. 21 said the California-based company decided not to inform authorities about Jesse Van Rootselaar’s interactions with its ChatGPT chatbot months before the Feb. 10 shootings. The report said some employees urged OpenAI leaders to alert Canadian law enforcement about Van Rootselaar’s activity, but company leaders ultimately decided not to do so and banned her account from the platform.
OpenAI officials had pre-scheduled meetings with senior B.C. government officials on Feb. 10 and the following day to discuss the possibility of opening an office in B.C. Eby confirmed Thursday that OpenAI admitted it knew relevant information during those meetings with provincial officials but failed to disclose it at the time, and later apologized.
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Eby said his chief of staff and the head of the B.C. public service met with senior OpenAI officials on Thursday. He said he declined to meet with OpenAI’s vice-president of safety, saying his message needs to be delivered directly to Altman.
“I think it’s important that Mr. Altman hear about how his team’s decision not to bring this information forward has resulted in the devastation that I witnessed firsthand in Tumbler Ridge,” said Eby on Thursday.
He said a meeting would take place but the details of when and how hadn’t yet been confirmed.
Six children and two women were killed in the attacks at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and a home in the small northeastern B.C. community. Dozens more were injured, including a 12-year-old girl who remains in hospital.
OpenAI’s vice-president of global policy, Anne O’Leary, said in a letter to Canadian federal ministers that the company is committed to an ongoing partnership with federal and provincial governments to strengthen safeguards on its ChatGPT chatbot.
The letter came after senior OpenAI officials met this week in Ottawa with federal AI and Digital Innovation Minister Evan Solomon, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, and other ministers.
O’Leary said OpenAI has worked with mental health, behavioural, and law enforcement experts to improve its protocol for referring concerning activity on ChatGPT to police. She said under the company’s current policies, Van Rootselaar’s interactions with ChatGPT would have been referred to police if they were discovered today.
O’Leary said that after Van Rootselaar’s account was banned in June 2025, she was able to create a second ChatGPT account despite a system designed to detect repeat policy violators who create new accounts after being banned from the platform. O’Leary said OpenAI was not aware of the second account until Van Rootselaar’s name was released by RCMP as the suspect in the Tumbler Ridge tragedy, and the company shared that account with law enforcement once it was discovered.
“We commit to strengthening our detection systems to better prevent attempts to evade our safeguards and prioritize identifying the highest risk offenders. We further commit to periodically assessing the thresholds used by our automated systems for detecting potential violent activities,” said O’Leary.
Her letter said OpenAI will also develop a direct point of contact with Canadian law enforcement and expand efforts to connect users with local support and resources based on their country or region.
Eby said OpenAI’s commitments in the wake of the shooting are important, but they are “cold comfort” for families in Tumbler Ridge.
Eby reiterated his call for federal regulations and a national threshold to require technology companies to bring information to law enforcement when they suspect someone may be using their platform to plan violent attacks.
“These are not small stakes. And it illustrates why these companies cannot be trusted to set their own reporting thresholds, and especially to set their own thresholds where there are no apparent consequences for not meeting them,” said Eby.
“It makes me worry about other AI companies – information that they have, their standards for reporting, what their thresholds are, and whether or not they would make the same decision to reach out to police after an incident,” he said.
Solomon said in Ottawa earlier this week “all options are on the table” as the federal government develops online privacy and data legislation.
