OpenAI's legal troubles over a deadly Canadian school shooting just multiplied. Thirty new federal lawsuits were filed Wednesday in California, where the company is based, on behalf of people caught in February's Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia attack, which left eight dead and dozens injured, many of them children, the Guardian reports. The filings say ChatGPT helped push 18-year-old shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar toward violence and that OpenAI's leadership knew she posed a serious danger but failed to alert authorities.
The cases, now totaling 37, accuse OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman of negligence, product defects, and aiding and abetting a mass shooting. Court documents say safety staff had labeled Van Rootselaar "a credible and specific threat of gun violence" eight months before the attack and banned her account, but she quickly opened another. Law firm Edelson PC says OpenAI's safety team wanted to notify Canadian authorities about the teen, but the lawsuits allege that they were overruled by Chris Lehane, OpenAI's head of global affairs, the CBC reports. Jay Edelson, the law firm's CEO, says OpenAI has refused to release Van Rootselaar's chat logs with ChatGPT.
OpenAI executive Jason Kwon said the company works hard to build protocols for involving law enforcement. He said he thinks of the tragedy daily. Kwon pushed back against some of the allegations in the lawsuits, denying that the company's investigators report to Lehane. Altman apologized in April, saying he was "deeply sorry" that the company didn't report the teen's conduct on ChatGPT to police.
- Lawyers say the families are seeking compensatory and punitive damages, and the suits also seek "to express society's condemnation and outrage over such egregious corporate malfeasance," per the CBC. "These were people who really endured just total hell that day," Edelson tells the Guardian. "Young kids who watched their teachers die, watched friends die and thought they were going to get shot and killed."
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