We want a villain we can subpoena.
When a community shatters, the human instinct demands a target that fits on a court summons. If a tragedy occurs and an algorithm lingers in the background, our collective grief desperately converts into a lawsuit. Governments line up to announce legal actions, promising accountability, transparency, and justice through the machinery of the courts. It plays well on the evening news. It offers a clean narrative of heroes fighting corporate titans.
It is also an expensive distraction from reality.
British Columbia’s consideration of legal action against OpenAI following the horrific events in Tumbler Ridge follows a familiar script. Whenever technology intersects with human violence or psychological collapse, policymakers rush to assign liability to the software. The underlying assumption is comforting: if we can hold the code responsible, we can regulate the tragedy away.
This is a dangerous fantasy.
Let us be entirely clear about what software is and what human behavior actually is. Large language models are probabilistic text predictors. They process token streams based on statistical weights derived from vast corpuses of human writing. They do not possess intent, malice, moral agency, or consciousness. Treating them as independent actors capable of inciting crime or sharing legal culpability creates a profound category error. When a government aims its legal artillery at a model developer because an individual used or interacted with a tool before committing an atrocity, the state is treating a symptom while ignoring the structural failures of public safety, mental health infrastructure, and human accountability.
The lazy consensus in modern policy circles says that tech companies bear direct responsibility for every downstream interaction their tools facilitate. Regulators argue that if a model is deployed, any harmful output or any tragic correlation between user behavior and system use makes the maker liable. This perspective collapses under the weight of basic logic. If a manufacturer builds a sturdy bridge, and an individual uses that bridge to plan a harmful act or experiences a psychological crisis while walking across it, we do not sue the civil engineering firm. We recognize that the tool is inert, and the human agent remains entirely responsible for their actions.
Shifting blame to artificial intelligence lets institutions off the hook. It is much easier for a provincial government to draft a high-profile statement of claim against a Silicon Valley enterprise than it is to audit, fund, and fix crumbling social services, understaffed crisis lines, and failing institutional safety nets. Lawsuits against tech firms provide political cover. They signal action while requiring zero structural reform of the actual systems responsible for protecting vulnerable populations.
Furthermore, the legal theories being floated against AI developers are built on quicksand. To win a negligence suit, a plaintiff must establish a duty of care, a breach of that duty, causation, and foreseeable harm. Proving that a specific model output directly caused an independent actor to commit a horrific crime crosses a massive evidentiary chasm. The defense will point out, correctly, that humans have committed unspeakable acts for millennia without the assistance of neural networks. Human psychology is infinitely complex, driven by trauma, isolation, ideological radicalization, and neurochemical imbalances. Reducing human agency to a software prompt is an insult to the complexity of human behavior and a poor foundation for jurisprudence.
None of this means developers get a free pass. There are legitimate fronts where technology companies must be held to account. Data privacy violations, intellectual property theft, anti-competitive practices, and deceptive marketing regarding safety capabilities are all valid arenas for regulatory oversight. If a company lies about its safety guardrails to inflate its valuation or mislead investors, bring down the hammer.
But confusing commercial regulation with criminal causation is a catastrophic mistake.
When we pretend that suing a software lab will prevent violent crime, we actively handicap our ability to stop real threats. We spend millions of dollars in legal fees and years in courtrooms arguing over proximate cause and terms of service, while the actual signposts of radicalization and mental health decay go unnoticed in the physical world. Violence is rarely born in a vacuum or sparked by a single chatbot exchange. It festers in social isolation, systemic neglect, and the breakdown of local community support structures.
Governments should stop chasing headlines by filing lawsuits they cannot logically win. Instead, they should invest those same resources into the unglamorous, difficult work of strengthening mental health response teams, improving local intervention programs, and supporting families before crises reach a boiling point.
The next time a tragedy occurs, let us muster the courage to look at the human causes rather than hiding behind the clean, convenient fiction of rogue code.
