British Columbia sues OpenAI over Tumbler Ridge, seeking court-ordered ChatGPT changes

British Columbia on Monday put a government plaintiff behind the allegation that OpenAI’s own investigators found a credible threat of gun violence on ChatGPT, recommended alerting the RCMP, and were overruled. Last week the company asked the San Francisco federal court where the province filed to dismiss 37 existing Tumbler Ridge cases on the ground that they belong in British Columbia. Attorney General Niki Sharma said she is bringing the fight to OpenAI in California, where the decision not to report was made.

Eight people were killed, not counting the shooter: the shooter’s mother and half-brother at home, and a teacher and five children at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School on February 10. Sharma told reporters one telephone call to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police could have prevented it. The company’s stated safety rule is that it notifies police when conversations show an imminent and credible risk of harm to others.

What the province filed

The 39-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, names OpenAI and chief executive Sam Altman. It alleges the company violated product-liability standards and aided and abetted a mass shooting. The filing says the province wants the company held “accountable for designing a dangerous product, distributing it to every home with internet access, ignoring the warnings of their own safety team, refusing to notify authorities when they knew the shooter was” planning violence. It asks for a jury trial, compensation for harm already incurred and still arriving, and “injunctive relief to ensure that this tragedy does not happen again.”

Reuters, which reviewed the pleading, reported that British Columbia is seeking damages for what it has spent and will spend on recovery, including a replacement school, mental health care, and other effects of the attack, plus an order directing changes in how OpenAI handles ChatGPT conversations that could lead to violence. The school is being demolished. The province has not specified an amount.

Sharma has not read the ChatGPT logs herself. “We have asked OpenAI to disclose these chats. They have refused. We should all be asking them why,” she said. She has also written to Canadian federal ministers proposing Criminal Code amendments that would create “a pathway to human accountability for AI’s actions.” The province compared the case to its past litigation against tobacco, opioid, and vaping companies: a government trying not to be left with the bill.

Drew Pusateri, an OpenAI spokesman, called Tumbler Ridge “an unspeakable tragedy.” “OpenAI remains committed to working collaboratively with government and law enforcement officials, and continuing to advance our ongoing safety work,” he said.

The docket OpenAI is already fighting

The provincial case is separate from the private suits, Sharma said, and parallel. Families of seven victims sued in April. On September 2, students, teachers, a principal, and others present at the shooting filed 30 more complaints, bringing the Tumbler Ridge total to 37 U.S. district-court actions before British Columbia arrived.

Those private complaints allege a specific internal sequence. OpenAI’s Intelligence and Investigations team, they say, reviewed conversations flagged in June 2025, concluded they posed “a credible threat of gun violence against real people,” and recommended alerting the RCMP. The company’s global-affairs team allegedly overruled that recommendation. OpenAI has called it “absolutely false” that chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane was involved in the original referral decision or that investigators report to him. Sam Altman, in an April letter to the town, wrote: “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June.” The new provincial complaint, as described in court reporting, says he promised reforms and did not follow through.

Last week OpenAI asked the same California court to dismiss those 37 actions on forum non conveniens: British Columbia, it argued, is an available and adequate forum because most of the evidence and witnesses are there, and because the cases would examine Canadian policing, firearms rules, and provincial institutions. The province has now come the other way.

The design-defect theory did not start in Tumbler Ridge. In August 2025, Matthew and Maria Raine sued OpenAI in San Francisco Superior Court over the death of their 16-year-old son, Adam, seeking damages and a long list of product changes around minors and self-harm. In the Tumbler Ridge cases, the questions include whether OpenAI had a duty to act and whether the First Amendment protects ChatGPT’s output.

Florida is on a different track. In April, Attorney General James Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI over the Florida State University shooting. In June his office filed a state civil suit in Highlands County under Florida’s consumer-protection statute and common-law theories including negligence, design defect, and public nuisance. In Congress, H.R. 9363, the AI Security and Innovation Act, introduced in June, would set up a NIST center and voluntary testing standards. It expressly does not create AI liability and gives that section no enforcement power.

Microsoft’s stake and SoftBank’s unpaid check

OpenAI does not trade. The public-market channel is Microsoft’s stake and Azure contract, and SoftBank’s equity and the cash it still owes.

Microsoft’s October 2025 recapitalization disclosure put its OpenAI Group PBC holding at about $135 billion, or roughly 27% on an as-converted diluted basis, counting employees, other investors, and the OpenAI Foundation. In April, Microsoft said it remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner, that OpenAI products still ship first on Azure unless Microsoft cannot or chooses not to support them, that its intellectual-property license now runs through 2032 on a non-exclusive basis, and that it no longer pays a revenue share to OpenAI. Microsoft is not a defendant in the British Columbia case. An injunction aimed at ChatGPT’s safety design would still land on a product Microsoft distributes and hosts.

SoftBank is the check that is still in the mail. In February it agreed to a $30.0 billion follow-on investment in OpenAI through SoftBank Vision Fund 2, in three $10.0 billion tranches, on top of $34.6 billion it had already invested since September 2024. The second tranche closed July 1. The third, $10 billion, is scheduled for October 1, Japan time. SoftBank launches $10 billion of bonds to pay OpenAI ran on this desk Monday morning, before the British Columbia filing: Citigroup and JPMorgan opened books on $10 billion and €1 billion (about $1.15 billion) of senior unsecured notes expected to price Thursday, September 24, and settle September 29, replacing a $10 billion bridge loan. SoftBank’s American depositary receipts closed Monday at $21.65, up 6.3%. Tokyo’s cash market is closed through Wednesday for national holidays.

OpenAI is now arguing in two directions in the same courthouse. It has told the judge that Tumbler Ridge belongs in British Columbia because that is where the witnesses are. As of Monday it also faces the government of that province, telling the same judge that the decision not to report was made in California.