As per a report by Law360, British Columbia's attorney general, Niki Sharma, and the Peace River South School District filed a civil suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman on September 21 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, over a February shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in northern B.C. The complaint alleges OpenAI's internal safety team flagged the shooter's account for concerning activity and recommended contacting police, but company leadership overruled that recommendation; a second account belonging to the shooter went undetected. Altman later wrote that he was "deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned."

The suit seeks a jury trial, damages, and injunctive relief intended to change how OpenAI handles conversations that suggest a risk of violence. It is among the first cases to test whether a government can hold an AI company to a legal duty to warn authorities, rather than just users, about a detected safety risk.