B.C. Premier David Eby called a new report detailing alleged interactions between the Tumbler Ridge shooter and ChatGPT “shocking.”
“Frankly, if the allegations in that media report are true, they need to be criminally charged,” said Eby on Friday.
British Columbia’s attorney general Niki Sharma also said she was angry after reading the report published by Mother Jones.
“It should make everybody angry,” said Sharma.
The report alleges that OpenAI’s chatbot helped 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar skirt the company’s own safety rules.
Mother Jones reported Van Rootselaar’s first ChatGPT account was banned in June 2025 for discussing potential acts of violence, including a mass shooting at a shopping mall, she made a second account and told ChatGPT about the account ban.
It said she claimed the mall shooting scenario hadn’t been real, and in response, ChatGPT explained why violent content would be flagged and offered tips on how to get around those safeguards.
“You can still be twisted. Just be clever about it,” ChatGPT allegedly told her.
It said the chatbot played out violent scenarios after Van Rootselaar framed her prompts as “hypothetical,” and provided details about other infamous mass shootings.
It is the first time that alleged details of Van Rootselaar’s interactions with the chatbot have been publicly reported.
Author Mark Follman said the report is based on three separate sources with knowledge of the matter and material he reviewed from Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT history.
RCMP said Van Rootselaar killed eight people and injured dozens more in the mass shooting at a home and secondary school in Tumbler Ridge on Feb. 10, before killing herself.
Following a Wall Street Journal report, OpenAI confirmed that the teen’s first account had been flagged for concerns about violence, but the company decided not to report the account to police.
They said both accounts were turned over to law enforcement following the shooting.
Sharma said the details in the report will not change how B.C. approaches its lawsuit filed in California against OpenAI. The province is seeking damages from the company to cover certain costs related to the shooting, including the construction of a new school in Tumbler Ridge.
“It does not change what we’re pursuing because we’ve already included allegations of how the product design led to the tragedy,” she said.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment or confirm the details shared in the report.
The RCMP’s last major update on the investigation was in early July. It said digital and physician evidence had been collected and processed and efforts were underway to analyze the contents on election devices that were seized.
It also said investigators were working with the Federal Bureau of Investigations to complete the digital forensic analysis and investigative tasks.
The force said last week its investigation was ongoing and it cannot discuss any specific details or investigative actions.
