A lawsuit against Meta Platforms for harming children will be financially ruinous, but new litigation against OpenAI’s ChatGPT involving a murder massacre in Canada should terrify every artificial-intelligence (AI) company and family in the world. On February 10, 2026, Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and half-brother at home in British Columbia, then went to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where she killed six people and injured 27 others before killing herself. Families of the victims have sued and allege that OpenAI was culpable because it banned the killer for hateful statements and making violent threats on its chatbot, ChatGPT, but didn’t report these to police. Worse, it allowed her back in, and she continued to make more intimidating statements and seek information. This case reveals an ongoing threat to the public because children and adults have access to chatbots and no AI company to date has devised a foolproof, preventative process to identify, impede, or report threats. Worse, chatbots have provided valuable information to killers. Years ago, Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI”, warned: “We need to use the engineering … before we build the super intelligent AI so that it doesn’t kill us all.”
Here’s chilling evidence of AI and chatbot dangers published in March by an AI-safety lobby called Transparency Coalition:
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