TORONTO: ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Friday it considered last year alerting Canadian police about the activities of a person who months later committed one of the worst school shootings in the country’s history.
OpenAI said last June the company identified the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar via abuse detection efforts for “furtherance of violent activities.”
The San Francisco tech company said it considered whether to refer the account the Royal Canadian Mounted Police but determined at the time that the account activity did not meet a threshold for referral to law enforcement. OpenAI banned the account in June 2025 for violating its usage policy.
The 18-year-old killed eight people in a remote part of British Columbia last week and died from a self-inflicted gun shot wound.
OpenAI said the threshold for referring a user to law enforcement is whether the case involves an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others. The company said it did not identify credible or imminent planning. The Wall Street Journal first reported OpenAI’s revelation.
OpenAI said that, after learning of the school shooting, employees reached out to the RCMP with information on the individual and their use of ChatGPT.
“Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the Tumbler Ridge tragedy. We proactively reached out to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with information on the individual and their use of ChatGPT, and we’ll continue to support their investigation,” an OpenAI spokesperson said.
The RCMP said Van Rootselaar first killed her mother and stepbrother at the family home before attacking the nearby school. Van Rootselaar had a history of mental health contacts with police.
The motive for the shooting remains unclear.
The town of 2,700 people in the Canadian Rockies is more than 1,000 kilometers northeast of Vancouver, near the provincial border with Alberta. Police said the victims included a 39-year-old teaching assistant and five students, ages 12 to 13.
The attack was Canada’s deadliest rampage since 2020, when a gunman in Nova Scotia killed 13 people and set fires that left another nine dead.
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI considered alerting Canadian police about school shooting suspect months ago
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ChatGPT-maker OpenAI considered alerting Canadian police about school shooting suspect months ago
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
