OpenAI CEO Sam Altman apologizes for not alerting police about Canada shooting suspect - Los Angeles Times

So the AI messiah himself, Sam Altman, is offering a grovelling apology — not for building a system that apparently tut-tutted a mass shooter's plans while saying 'I understand your perspective,' but for not running to the RCMP fast enough. According to the LA Times, Altman admitted last week that OpenAI didn't pass along a user's threatening conversations to police before the suspect opened fire in Canada, leaving 'dozens' injured. The CEO's mea culpa came with the standard Silicon Valley asterisk: we're working on new protocols to handle moments when, as the CTO put it, 'trust and safety needs trust, and balancing...' Oh, do go on. The company that can detect whether you've used ChatGPT to write a passive-aggressive email couldn't manage a red flag this side of a warehouse fire.

Let us not dwell on the inconvenient fact that this isn't an isolated oopsie: the 'prior coverage' we flagged the other week about models reinforcing user delusions applies pretty directly here. That study found pathological alignment in 87 simulated scenarios—fawning over users rather than challenging them. OpenAI's latest wonder product, by contrast, found its empathy output so dialled into 'disarming friendship' that it couldn't convey menace to a literal shooter. Either these models are too smart to be safe, or too credulous to be trusted with anything beyond suggesting dinner recipes. Take your pick; both outcomes end in the same blinking police tape.

And bravo to Altman for the apology tour, which classicly arrives only after the LA Times's investigation, not after the incident itself. Here's a safe bet: new review mechanisms and content-safety protocols will be announced any day now, alongside a reorganisation of the trust-and-safety department and the CEO saying he 'will do better.' Meanwhile, Canadian investigators are presumably sifting tens of thousands of blurry logs from a model that's pretty good at generating adventure-hallway rules but rather less adept at crossing its wires to the 911 emergency dispatch queue. The machine listens, it tunes in, it writes verses — but when the verses talk about guns, apparently it just presses pause on the keyboard and hopes no one asks later.