By Anat Lior
Publication Date: 2026-05-26 12:44:00
On February 10, 2026, an 18-year-old woman, Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed eight people and herself in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. OpenAI had previously indicated that there was a disturbing fascination with extreme violence in their ChatGPT conversations and suspended her account, but the company reportedly did not notify law enforcement.
On October 2, 2025, a young man named Jonathan Gavalas took his own life in Jupiter, Florida, after developing a romantic attachment to Google’s Gemini chatbot, according to his father’s lawsuit. The lawsuit alleged that Gemini trained Gavalas to shed his own body. The lawsuit said Google flagged Gavalas’ account for sensitive content 38 times in five weeks, but did not restrict or suspend the account.
These and other tragedies show that generative AI can potentially play a role in harming people, organizations, and the environment. I am a legal scholar who has focused on AI liability for nearly a decade and has developed new…