OpenAI’s chatbot fed the school shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre, our investigation reveals.
In June 2025, Jesse Van Rootselaar received an email notification from OpenAI. Van Rootselaar had been using ChatGPT to discuss committing potential acts of violence—including a mass shooting at a shopping mall—and now OpenAI had banned that account. But the troubled teen living in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, was not deterred and soon logged back on with a second account.
In case anybody doubted the corporation that was actively complicit.
OpenAI is a megacorporation that pays people to read through your conversations, and flagged the killer’s account for threats of violence, but failed to follow up.
Can you explain how OpenAI is not guilty of negligence when they sell a product that promises they are careful?
The AI companies are apparently inundated with flags of all sorts of behaviour from criminal to oddly sexual etc prompts from 160+ countries around the world. I don’t think their terms of service guarantee anything around safety specifically. My point really though was, whilst these companies should put the guardrails in place, the primary blame still sits with the human who made the decision to act illegally. We should not be turning away from the actual actor. Humans are also using devious ways to get around the guardrails (like Tesla drivers who do hacks to bypass safeguards for autopilot), and these are deliberate actions.