GoKawiilOpenAI could have prevented one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canada’s history, a string of seven lawsuits filed Wednesday in a California court alleged.
Ultimately, the AI company overruled recommendations from its internal safety team. More than eight months prior to the school shooting, trained experts had flagged a ChatGPT account later linked to the shooter as posing a credible threat of gun violence in the real world. In those cases, OpenAI is expected to notify police—which, in this case, already had a file on the shooter and had proactively removed guns from their home previously—but that’s not what happened.
Apparently, OpenAI decided that the user’s privacy and the potential stress of an encounter with cops outweighed the risks of violence, whistleblowers told The Wall Street Journal. Leaders rejected the safety team’s urgings and declined to report the user to law enforcement. Instead, OpenAI simply deactivated the account, then quickly followed up to tell the shooter how to get back on ChatGPT to continue planning by signing up with another email address, the lawsuits alleged.
That was a mistake, Sam Altman has since said, while maintaining that the account was supposedly “banned.”
In a public apology shared last week with grieving community members in a 2,000-person rural mining town called Tumbler Ridge, the OpenAI CEO promised to do better next time.
OpenAI will “find ways to prevent tragedies like this in the future” and to continue “working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again,” Altman said.
“I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June,” Altman said. “While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered.”