OpenAI Asks B.C. Court to Quash Privacy Commissioner’s Probe Tied to the Tumbler Ridge Shooting
OpenAI has gone to the B.C. Supreme Court to stop an investigation by British Columbia’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner into how ChatGPT handled the account of the Tumbler Ridge shooter, CBC News reported. In a petition filed this week, the company argues the probe goes beyond the statutory and constitutional limits of the commissioner’s authority and that the office has not identified reasonable grounds to believe OpenAI broke the province’s Personal Information Protection Act.
The investigation was opened in June but only became public when the commissioner issued a statement a day after the filing. It concerns the February 10 attack in which Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, killed six children and two adults in the northeastern B.C. town before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Van Rootselaar allegedly used ChatGPT to help plan the attack. OpenAI has said the activity was flagged internally for violent content and the account was shut down, but it later acknowledged missing a second account, and chief executive Sam Altman apologised to the community for not alerting Canadian authorities.
According to the commissioner’s office, the probe asks whether the way ChatGPT used personal information, including prompts, uploaded content and usage data, is something a reasonable person would consider appropriate, including the potential for its responses to influence behaviour. OpenAI counters that the issues were already examined in a three-year joint investigation by Canadian privacy regulators, which concluded in May that the company lacked accountability and launched ChatGPT without fully addressing known privacy problems. It says commitments made after that finding bring it into line with B.C. law, and it calls a production order seeking the shooter’s chat logs and its internal records on the decision not to refer the account to police overbroad and unnecessary.
What it means in practice
The case will test how far a provincial regulator can reach into the workings of a foreign AI service used by British Columbians. It adds to a growing list of pressure points: the province is already suing OpenAI in California over the failure to warn police, and dozens of civil suits have been filed on behalf of victims and witnesses. Questions about whether Canadian rules can bind U.S.-based platforms have surfaced before, as when House officials told MPs that U.S. courts could reach the Commons’ AI data, while Ottawa’s AI transparency consultation sought views on disclosure and incident reporting for AI systems.
What to watch next is whether the court pauses the production order while the petition is heard, how the commissioner answers in its own filings, and whether the outcome shapes how other provinces examine AI chatbots that encounter threats of violence.