After Tumbler Ridge, a Different Model

Send us Fan MailDescriptionThe family of a 12-year-old shot three times at Tumbler Ridge Secondary is suing OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges approximately 12 employees flagged the shooter's ChatGPT interactions as an imminent risk and recommended calling police. Leadership rebuffed them. The same day the lawsuit landed, security researcher Bruce Schneier argued in the Globe and Mail that Canada should stop funneling its $2 billion AI strategy to American tech companies and build public AI instead. His model: Switzerland's Apertus. Released last September by ETH Zurich and partners, Apertus is fully open, trained on 15 trillion tokens across 1,000 languages, powered by renewable hydropower, and compliant with the EU AI Act. It cost a fraction of what corporate labs spend. Canada has Vector Institute, Mila, and CIFAR. The question is what gets built with them.SourcesCBC News. "Family of Tumbler Ridge shooting victim suing OpenAI." March 9, 2026.CP24/Canadian Press. "Mother of wounded Maya Gebala sues OpenAI over mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C." March 10, 2026.The Globe and Mail. "OpenAI has shown it cannot be trusted. Canada needs nationalized, public AI." Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders. March 11, 2026.Schneier on Security. "Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI." March 11, 2026.ETH Zurich. "Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model." September 2, 2025.Swiss AI Initiative. "Apertus." swiss-ai.org.