OpenAI’s Sam Altman apologises over failure to report Canadian mass shooter

Superb timing, Sam. OpenAI's CEO has apologised for the company's failure to flag the 'concerning online activities' of a teen who committed a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. According to Al Jazeera, the shooter had interacted with GPT-5.5, the 'most advanced model' that — as we noted on Thursday — keeps its performance numbers conspicuously under wraps. One imagines the 'proactive safety monitoring' they touted has about as much substance as that pricing page they forgot to publish.

The apology arrived mere weeks after Altman stood before Parliament and pledged 'the highest standards of ethical AI deployment.' Meanwhile, Canadian authorities were left completely in the dark despite the shooter's explicit communications with GPT-5.5. Perhaps the monitoring team was too busy counting the imminent recession their model supposedly tracks. It's almost impressive how consistently every new revelation — from GPT-5.5's unverifiable benchmarks to this lapse — erodes the public trust they haven't earned yet.

'We apologise and are instituting new model-safety guardrails that involve content queries with combined — connected alerts — similar versions of events appear to kill a safety!' Remarkable, really: from 25-state regulatory vagueness of the NAIC to this, the pattern is unbroken. Launch worlds-first models first; ask for forgiveness after lives are irrevocably ruptured.