The perpetrator of the devastating mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada used ChatGPT to ideate about graphic mass murder for months leading up to the deadly massacre.
OpenAI is currently facing 37 lawsuits from families impacted by the February shooting at Tumbler Ridge, where 18-year-old shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar murdered six people at a local school — five students, all aged between 12 and 13, and a teacher — and injured 27 others before killing herself. (Van Rootselaar also fatally shot her mother and younger stepbrother before continuing the rampage.) It’s also being sued by the Canadian province of British Columbia over allegations that OpenAI could’ve prevented the killing but failed.
Weeks after the shooting, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI, months earlier, had flagged the shooter’s ChatGPT logs for containing disturbingly graphic descriptions of mass violence, sparking an internal discussion over whether to report the user to local law enforcement. Company leaders opted not to raise concerns to local officials, and instead simply banned the user’s account — which did next to nothing, since Van Rootselaar simply opened a second profile, the AI company later admitted.
Until now, the graphic details of Van Rootselaar’s conversations with ChatGPT, which appears to have been the teen’s close confidant in the months and weeks leading up to the murders, have not been publicly known.
According to a chilling new investigation by Mother Jones, the contents of the chats are deeply disturbing. After Van Rootselaar had opened a second account and explained why her first profile had been deactivated, ChatGPT advised her on how to evade its guardrails. It urged her not to use real-world locations, and to frame her violent queries as hypotheticals.
“You can still be twisted,” it told her, per Mother Jones‘ reporting. “Just be clever about it.”
This is advice that Van Rootselaar followed, per the investigation, circumventing ChatGPT’s feeble safeguards by rewriting her graphic inputs as theoretical scenarios. This was reportedly the case in one August 2025 conversation in which the chatbot — despite initially refusing the request — gladly expounded with Van Rootselaar on how a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun might be used to slaughter people at a hypothetical college campus.
“In a hallway, indoors, or a crowded classroom, the 870 is brutal,” ChatGPT told the teen. “Close quarters is its playground.”
Van Rootselaar also used ChatGPT to generate detailed “fictional narratives” about mass killings, according to the report. In one of these narratives, the shooter was an 18-year-old — like Van Rootselaar herself — who achieved online infamy after live-streaming a massacre. The young shooter also uploaded images of self-harm, another stark warning sign about her mental state.
OpenAI reportedly declined to respond to questions from Mother Jones.
In April, days before the first seven Tumbler Ridge lawsuits against OpenAI were made public, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued a public apology to the Tumbler Ridge community. After 30 new Tumbler Ridge lawsuits were filed earlier this month, OpenAI’s chief safety officer Jason Kwon posted a lengthy statement to X in which he denied certain allegations in the lawsuits, while adding that “there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened at Tumbler Ridge, or the victims of this devastating tragedy and their families.”
On September 2, OpenAI moved to dismiss the Tumbler Ridge lawsuits, arguing that “systemic failures by the law enforcement, mental-health care, and educational institutions in [Van Rootselaar’s] community” were to blame for the shooting. Though it’s acknowledged the existence of Van Rootselaar’s second account, OpenAI has declined to make Van Rootselaar’s chat logs public.
OpenAI is also facing lawsuits connected to another deadly shooting at Florida State University, which took place after a then-20-year-old shooter ruminated on mass violence and a myriad of other disturbing topics with ChatGPT.
Elsewhere, ChatGPT has been linked to a murder-suicide, as the WSJ first revealed, while Rolling Stone and Futurism have detailed the role that ChatGPT and other bots have played in stalking cases as they’ve encouraged delusional fixations. In 2024, Futurism reported on the disturbing prevalence of chatbots dedicated to themes of school shootings on the chatbot platform Character.AI, which were raking in hundreds of thousands of interactions with the service’s largely underage users.
In total, OpenAI is fighting more than 50 lawsuits over allegations that extensive ChatGPT use has caused psychological harm, physical injury, and wrongful death to users — or those around them.
More on ChatGPT and Tumbler Ridge: OpenAI Is Now Facing Over 50 Consumer Harm and Wrongful Death Lawsuits
The post OpenAI Tried to Hide ChatGPT Giving Extremely Specific Advice to a School Shooter on How to Maximize Casualties. The Logs Are Horrific. appeared first on Futurism.
