B.C. Premier David Eby said OpenAI’s Sam Altman agreed to apologize to the families of Tumbler Ridge and to work on helping design regulations to force companies to report certain types of AI chat activity to police.
“Everybody in the call recognized that apologies are never sufficient, but also that it is completely necessary,” Eby said.
Eby wants a minimum standard for when companies must inform police about certain types of activity.
He said this regulation should be made at the federal level, and that Altman agreed that OpenAI would work with the provincial government to recommend and advocate for rules that would be effective and could be implemented immediately.
“I can’t think of a better example of where we need to start on a regulation than ensuring that when these companies have information that harm is going to be caused to people, that they will report that to the police,” Eby said.
He wants to make this a legal obligation for companies operating AI chat services, such as OpenAI, Alphabet, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI.
OpenAI came forward after the Feb. 10 Tumbler Ridge mass shooting in which nine people died to inform police that the company had suspended the suspect’s ChatGPT account due to suspicious activity, but had not reported this at the time.