OpenAI considered alerting Canadian police about school shooting suspect months ago (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 day ago by HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has said it considered alerting Canadian police last year about the activities of a person who months later committed one of the worst school shootings in the country’s history.

OpenAI said last June the company identified the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar via abuse detection efforts for “furtherance of violent activities”.

The San Francisco tech company said on Friday it considered whether to refer the account to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) but determined at the time that the account activity did not meet a threshold for referral to law enforcement.

OpenAI banned the account in June 2025 for violating its usage policy.

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[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 5 points 18 hours ago

I understand your point, but there are also legal ramifications and scary potential consequences should this have transpired.

For instance, do we want ICE to have access to data about user behaviour? They might already have that.

Who decides the bar of acceptable behaviour?

[-] GameGod@lemmy.ca 2 points 14 hours ago

I'm confident that ICE and other US law enforcement agencies already have access to it. There is no presumption of privacy on anything you enter into any cloud-based LLM like ChatGPT, or even any search engine.

The consequences are already there and have been for like 15 years.