{"id":49575,"date":"2026-04-25T15:01:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T15:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/sam-altman-says-he-is-deeply-sorry-for-failing-to-alert-police-ahead-of-mass-shooting\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T15:01:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T15:01:12","slug":"sam-altman-says-he-is-deeply-sorry-for-failing-to-alert-police-ahead-of-mass-shooting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/sam-altman-says-he-is-deeply-sorry-for-failing-to-alert-police-ahead-of-mass-shooting\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman says he is &#8216;deeply sorry&#8217; for failing to alert police ahead of mass shooting"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69cc21d86a864f6fcd7bc0fc?format=jpeg\" alt=\"OpenAI CEO Sam Altman onstage at an event in Washington, DC, March 2026\"\/><figcaption>OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.<\/p>\n<p>Anna Moneymaker\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Sam Altman apologized to a community in Canada after a mass shooting by a banned ChatGPT user.<\/li>\n<li>The OpenAI CEO said he is &quot;deeply sorry&quot; his company didn&#039;t alert police to the shooter&#039;s activity.<\/li>\n<li>He promised to &quot;help ensure something like this never happens again.&quot;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>OpenAI boss Sam Altman has apologized to a Canadian community for failing to alert authorities about a banned ChatGPT account linked to a teenager who went on to commit a mass shooting.<\/p>\n<p>Jesse Van Rootselaar, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound during the attack in January, killed eight people and injured dozens of others in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia.<\/p>\n<p>OpenAI said it banned 18-year-old Van Rootselaar&#039;s ChatGPT account because of problematic usage, but did not refer the matter to police because it did not meet its threshold of a credible or imminent plan for serious physical harm to others.<\/p>\n<p>Altman said he was &quot;deeply sorry,&quot; in a letter &quot;to the community of Tumbler Ridge,&quot; which was published in full by a local news website.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The pain your community has endured is unimaginable. I have been thinking of you often over the past few months,&quot; Altman wrote.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;When I spoke with Mayor Krakowka and Premier Eby about this tragedy, they conveyed the anger, sadness, and concern being felt across Tumbler Ridge,&quot; he continued. &quot;We agreed a public apology was necessary, but that time was also needed to respect the community as you grieved. I share this letter with the understanding that everyone grieves in their own way and in their own time.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Altman wrote that he could not imagine &quot;anything worse&quot; than losing a child. &quot;My heart remains with the victims, their families, all members of the community, and the province of British Columbia.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>He wrote that going forward, his company would work with all levels of government to ensure &quot;something like this&quot; never happens again.<\/p>\n<p>ChatGPT&#039;s famously sycophantic personality has led some users down dark paths, leading OpenAI to revise how the chatbot behaves when asked about sensitive subjects like depression.<\/p>\n<p>OpenAI is facing an ongoing lawsuit filed by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine. The suit alleges ChatGPT &quot;actively helped&quot; Raine explore suicide methods over several months before he died. OpenAI previously told Business Insider that it was saddened by Raine&#039;s death and that ChatGPT includes safeguards.<\/p>\n<p>OpenAI said last year that it was working with mental health professionals to improve how ChatGPT responds to users who show signs of psychosis or mania, self-harm or suicide, or emotional attachment to the chatbot.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Anna Moneymaker\/Getty Images Sam Altman apologized to a community in Canada after a mass shooting by a banned ChatGPT user. The OpenAI CEO said he is &quot;deeply sorry&quot; his company didn&#039;t alert police to the shooter&#039;s activity. He promised to &quot;help ensure something like this never happens again.&quot; OpenAI boss Sam [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49576,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49575","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}