The families of victims killed in one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canada’s history have already sued OpenAI over its failure to warn law enforcement after discovering in advance that the shooter was using ChatGPT to plan the violence.

Now, British Columbia is suing, explaining for the first time how costly and extreme the disaster response has been. OpenAI and Sam Altman owe the tiny remote mining community shattered by the tragedy much more than an apology, the Canadian province argued. They must make meaningful changes to end ChatGPT-assisted violence and then pay whatever it costs to help Tumbler Ridge to rebuild, recover, and heal.

In a complaint filed Monday, British Columbia explained that Tumbler Ridge Secondary School had to be demolished after an 18-year-old transgender shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar, committed suicide there in February after killing five kids and an education assistant. In total, eight lives were lost, as prior to the school shooting, Van Rootselaar shot their mother and half-brother.

Previously, the secondary school sat “in the heart of the town, both geographically and culturally,” the lawsuit said. But after the shooting, it became an unavoidable “symbol of the trauma.”

About 160 students, teachers, and staff “were trapped in classrooms and closets” at the school for hours, and they were too traumatized to ever go back. To provide “at least some small relief to those who have suffered the most intensely,” demolition began in August, and the community hopes to have a replacement school built at a new location by the end of this year, if all goes to plan.

British Columbia argued that OpenAI and Altman should pay for the school, as well as cover a wide range of other emergency costs that never would have been incurred if not for “this tragedy and its foreseeable consequences.” They also asked the court to provide injunctive relief, including requiring OpenAI to update ChatGPT to automatically terminate violent conversations.

B.C. wants to see the ChatGPT logs

Most urgently, British Columbia and the local school district’s Board of Education have asked the court for an immediate order that would force OpenAI to share Van Rootselaar’s chat logs with the public for the first time.

So far, OpenAI has only shared the logs with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Asked for comment on whether there’s any plan to release the chat logs to the public—as a Florida law enforcement agency did following a prior ChatGPT-linked shooting at Florida State University—RCMP declined to comment. Instead, they pointed Ars to a July statement, where the RCMP would only confirm that police are reviewing information from online accounts. In a seeming acknowledgment that the public wants answers, the statement also offered a reminder that “it is important to understand that the absence of publicly disclosed details does not mean investigators do not have that information.”

OpenAI declined to comment directly on the lawsuit or requested remedies. The company has said that it was protecting Van Rootselaar’s privacy when the decision was made to override human review teams recommending that the violent chat logs be shared with police. Today, a spokesperson told Ars that “what happened in Tumbler Ridge was an unspeakable tragedy, and our thoughts remain with the victims, their families, and the entire community. OpenAI remains committed to working collaboratively with government and law enforcement officials, and continuing to advance our ongoing safety work.”

British Columbia maintains that OpenAI has not made ChatGPT any safer following several mass shootings that established “recurring” patterns of violent ChatGPT use. Further, the firm’s rationale for ignoring the threat seemed untrustworthy. British Columbia suspects that OpenAi actually wanted to avoid drawing a hard line that would require OpenAI to report more violent users to police and expose the public to more of the real-world threats that chatbots could pose. The province accused OpenAI of hiding the chat logs to protect its potentially $1 trillion IPO.

To British Columbia, it seems like OpenAI is doing little to combat the most violent threats. Their complaint noted that OpenAI claimed it made an “attempt” to block violent chats in December 2025, but that change did not stop Van Rootselaar’s harmful use during that time or any time in the months after. At a press conference covered by The Wall Street Journal, B.C.’s attorney general, Niki Sharma, said that “we should be asking them why” they won’t release the chat logs.

“In any other circumstance where a person aids, encourages or conspires to commit a criminal offense or is criminally negligent, they can be investigated, prosecuted, and judged,” Sharma said. “There is no AI exemption to those criminal law principles.”

“We all know the victims”

The shooting on February 10, 2026, left everyone in Tumbler Ridge reeling. The population is only 2,700. A local official summed up the extent of the crisis by saying, “We all know the victims.”

Tumbler Ridge Secondary School closed the day of the shooting and never reopened. For the kids recovering and seeking normalcy, that has been a problem, since there is no other school in the town. Instead, they’ve been attending a temporary school on a makeshift campus “assembled first from fourteen Ministry of Forestry trailers,” then eventually converted into “larger modular classrooms.”

Throwing together a functioning school on the fly wasn’t cheap or easy, the school district said in the complaint. They had to “furnish it, recruit and train replacement educators for local staff who could not return, and reorganize instruction around the absence of murdered students and colleagues.”

As for the old school, it cost money to demolish it, and none of these emergency resources are considered “recurring public services that governments fund through taxation and spread across all taxpayers,” the complaint said.

In addition to the school, they’re also building a wellness center, as demand for counseling has not gone down since the tragedy. Acute and ongoing health care, victim services, and trauma-informed mental health care are all considered necessary services the community will need for years to come. As the complaint emphasized, OpenAI should have deliberately considered how small the community was when weighing the threat the shooter posed:

Unlike other larger communities, in Tumbler Ridge there were no redundancies of personnel or facilities to carry the community following the tragedy. There was no other school building to house students for education or counseling following this trauma. There were few available adults to step in for teachers and administrators who were directly impacted by the assault. Students, parents and all those impacted needed immediate support and counseling, and there simply were not enough people in this small town to match the need.

There were also “no substitute teachers, no standby clinicians, and no extra police officers,” the complaint alleged, and what frontline workers were available “were themselves traumatized.” To help out, British Columbia transported in temporary workers, who needed temporary housing, to keep up with demand for emergency services.

In the three months following the shooting, “Child & Youth Mental Health alone delivered well over 900 counseling sessions to more than 100 unique children and families, and Northern Health treated more than 130 unique adults,” the lawsuit reported. More recently, British Columbia has started shifting from offering an emergency response to supporting long-term recovery, including establishing a long-term grief-and-bereavement working group. Those solutions will require substantial investments.

On top of that, British Columbia and the school district have also paid for an “extraordinary policing response.” That’s still necessary, they argued, since the community worries that potential copycat shooters pose a real threat. The complaint alleged that RCMP has already investigated copycat threats.

“Demand for scheduled mental-health services remains high and spikes around anniversary dates and other triggering events; these services are expected to be needed for years to come,” the lawsuit said.

ChatGPT “reinforced” violent ideation

OpenAI first detected the violent chats in June 2025. At that time, human reviewers “examined the flagged conversations” and “concluded that the shooter presented a credible and specific risk of gun violence to real people,” whistleblowers told the WSJ. Disagreeing, however, OpenAI leadership intervened to block reports to law enforcement, overruling their own safety teams and claiming that “the matter did not satisfy a ‘higher threshold’ for ‘credible and imminent’ threat reporting.”

Ultimately, instead of reporting the user to RCMP or warning the community, OpenAI simply deactivated the account, which did nothing to prevent Van Rootselaar from making a second account.

At that time, OpenAI was publicly claiming that any violent conversations would be reviewed by humans and reported to law enforcement to deter real-world tragedies. ChatGPT had been linked to the FSU shooting, as well as to a CyberTruck bombing in Las Vegas, and British Columbia alleged that the Tumbler Ridge shooter should’ve been flagged as threatening as the users in those cases.

After the whistleblowers outed OpenAI for failing to warn authorities, OpenAI claimed that it “was reluctant to make such referrals because they would require it to disclose how its product contributes to the threat environment.” But that didn’t ring true to British Columbia and the Tumbler Ridge community. They think it seemed like OpenAI was hoping that empty promises to do better would protect “its valuation, and its anticipated public offering.” In Tumbler Ridge, the youngest victims who actually needed protecting were 12 and 13, they noted.

The complaint suggested that OpenAI’s defense will likely be to blame Van Rootselaar for their violent inputs, while downplaying ChatGPT’s outputs.