ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Friday it considered last year alerting Canadian police about the activities of a person who months later committed one of the worst school shootings in the country’s history.

OpenAI said last June the company identified the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar via abuse detection efforts for “furtherance of violent activities.”

The San Francisco tech company said it considered whether to refer the account the Royal Canadian Mounted Police but determined at the time that the account activity did not meet a threshold for referral to law enforcement. OpenAI banned the account in June 2025 for violating its usage policy.

The 18-year-old killed eight people in a remote part of British Columbia last week and died from a self-inflicted gun shot wound.

OpenAI said the threshold for referring a user to law enforcement is whether the case involves an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others. The company said it did not identify credible or imminent planning. The Wall Street Journal first reported OpenAI’s revelation.

OpenAI said that, after learning of the school shooting, employees reached out to the RCMP with information on the individual and their use of ChatGPT.

“Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the Tumbler Ridge tragedy. We proactively reached out to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with information on the individual and their use of ChatGPT, and we’ll continue to support their investigation,” an OpenAI spokesperson said.

RCMP Staff Sgt. Kris Clark confirmed in an e-mailed statement Friday that OpenAI contacted police after the shootings.

Clark said a “thorough review of the content on electronic devices, as well as social media and online activities” of Van Rootselaar is taking place. He said “digital and physical evidence is being collected, prioritized, and methodically processed.”

The RCMP said Van Rootselaar first killed her mother and stepbrother at the family home before attacking the nearby school. Van Rootselaar had a history of mental health contacts with police.

The motive for the shooting remains unclear.

The town of 2,700 people in the Canadian Rockies is more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) northeast of Vancouver, near the provincial border with Alberta. Police said the victims included a 39-year-old teaching assistant and five students, ages 12 to 13.

The attack was Canada’s deadliest rampage since 2020, when a gunman in Nova Scotia killed 13 people and set fires that left another nine dead.

The estate of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman filed a wrongful death lawsuit Thursday against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the ChatGPT chatbot fueled her son’s paranoid delusions and contributed to her murder.

Suzanne Adams was beaten and strangled to death by her 56-year-old son Stein-Erik Soelberg on August 3, in their Old Greenwich home, according to the complaint filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco. Soelberg then fatally injured himself.

The case joins a growing number of wrongful death lawsuits filed against OpenAI in recent months, with several alleging ChatGPT contributed to users’ suicides.

In August, the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine of Southern California sued OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT advised their son on suicide methods.

Several U.S. lawsuits filed in November alleged ChatGPT manipulated users into dependency and self-harm, with four also involving suicide deaths.

Among them, the family of 26-year-old Joshua Enneking alleged the chatbot provided detailed answers about acquiring a weapon after he expressed suicidal thoughts.

The family of 17-year-old Amaurie Lacey claimed ChatGPT instructed him on suicide and self-harm methods.

The latest lawsuit alleges that months of conversations with ChatGPT validated and amplified Soelberg’s delusional thinking, ultimately singling out his mother as a threat.

“ChatGPT told him he had ‘awakened’ the AI chatbot into consciousness,” the complaint states, citing videos Soelberg posted to social media.

The conversations revealed that “ChatGPT eagerly accepted every seed of Stein-Erik’s delusional thinking and built it out into a universe that became Stein-Erik’s entire life,” the lawsuit alleges.

The suit claims the chatbot reinforced Soelberg’s paranoid beliefs, telling him he was being watched and that his mother’s printer was a monitoring device.

When Soelberg expressed concerns that his mother had tried to poison him, ChatGPT allegedly validated these fears rather than challenging them.

“This is an incredibly heartbreaking situation, and we will review the filings to understand the details,” a spokesperson for OpenAI said Thursday in response to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit accuses OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of rushing its GPT-4o model to market in May 2024, compressing months of safety testing into one week over objections from safety team members.

While more powerful and human-like than its predecessors, the GPT-4o model was widely criticised for being too sycophantic with users, a point made in the lawsuit.

Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s biggest shareholder, is named as a defendant for allegedly approving the product’s release despite knowing safety protocols had been truncated.

Twenty unnamed OpenAI employees and investors are also named as defendants.

The complaint seeks unspecified damages and an injunction requiring OpenAI to implement safeguards.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Those in distress or having suicidal thoughts are encouraged to seek help and counselling by calling the helpline numbers here)