Tarasoff Meets the AI Age

(Anat Lior – Lawfare) OpenAI recently disclosed that it was aware of concerning behavior by one of its users, Jesse Van Roostelaar from British Columbia, and suspended her ChatGPT account in June 2025. (While OpenAI and authorities have not shared the exact content of her interactions with the chatbot, a New York Times investigation into Van Roostelaar’s social media activity documented her posts about mental health issues, substance abuse, weapons, and online violence.) Following internal deliberations, OpenAI decided not to notify authorities about the “disturbing” nature of Van Roostelaar’s interactions with ChatGPT, stating that the content did not meet their threshold for reporting to law enforcement, which requires evidence of immediate risk of severe physical harm to others. On Feb. 10, 18-year-old Van Roostelaar carried out a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., killing nine people—including herself. The warning signs were clear. British Columbia Premier David Eby suggested that OpenAI may have had the opportunity to prevent the mass shooting. The critical question that emerges from this case is whether the company’s failure to act amounts to negligence. When a therapist learns that their patient intends to harm someone, the law may require them to act. This principle, born from the landmark Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California decision, raises an urgent and largely unresolved question in the age of generative artificial intelligence: What happens when the entity with foreknowledge of harm is not a human clinician, but a chatbot? As OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other AI companies deploy increasingly powerful conversational systems, they may find themselves in possession of information suggesting that a user—or someone that user intends to target—is at serious risk. Understanding Tarasoff’s foundational holding as well as the doctrinal questions its application to AI would raise, including how courts might navigate the tension between a duty to protect and the privacy interests of users, is essential to answering this question. – Tarasoff Meets the AI Age | Lawfare