OpenAI Lawsuits Mount Over Canadian School Shooting

More victims from the Tumbler Ridge massacre are suing OpenAI over its failure to alert police about ChatGPT interactions with the suspect months before the February mass shooting in Canada.

The new batch of lawsuits builds upon seven filed in April by families of victims from the shooting. They allege the AI company acted in negligence, violated product-liability standards and aided and abetted the massacre.

The cases add to a wave of more than three dozen lawsuits that allege chatbots including ChatGPT have led to harm for their users—or encouraged their users to commit acts of harm against others.

The Tumbler Ridge attack, which killed eight people and injured more than 25 in the British Columbia mining town, marked one of the worst mass shootings in Canada in years.

The new suits were filed by people who witnessed the shooting at the town’s secondary school, including Deidre Rushlow, a seventh-grade teacher who sheltered students under her desk. Plaintiffs also include A.C., a 13-year-old boy who played dead among his classmates and D.I., a student who had to step over the body of a classmate to evacuate the school.

“My colleagues and I are haunted by the memory of shielding children with our own bodies as our ears rang from the sound of continual gunshots and high-pitched screams,” Rushlow, the teacher, said in a statement provided by her lawyer, Jay Edelson.

OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon said that the company works hard to look for warning signs of serious violence, while protecting the privacy of users. OpenAI also partners with mental health, behavioral and law-enforcement experts to help refine its criteria for when a conversation crosses the line into an imminent and credible risk, he said.

“That judgment is not infallible, but it is always rooted in looking out for this balance for people,” Kwon said. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened at Tumbler Ridge, or the victims of this devastating tragedy and their families.”

Months before Jesse Van Rootselaar became the suspect in the Tumbler Ridge massacre, OpenAI considered alerting law enforcement about her interactions with ChatGPT, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. While using ChatGPT, Van Rootselaar had described scenarios involving gun violence over the course of several days.

OpenAI leaders ultimately decided not to contact authorities until after the shooting.

In February, police identified Van Rootselaar, an 18-year-old transgender woman, as the suspect in the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting. Van Rootselaar was found dead at the scene of the shooting.

OpenAI has said that the company banned the shooting suspect’s account months before the attack. The company has said it discovered a second ChatGPT account the suspect was using after her name was released publicly.

OpenAI has also said that it bolstered safety protocols since the shooting, and said under its enhanced law-enforcement referral rules, it would have referred Van Rootselaar’s account to law enforcement if the activity were discovered today.

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman apologized to the people of Tumbler Ridge in April for not alerting police to the suspect’s activity on ChatGPT.

Edelson, the attorney, has said the victims’ families are asking for OpenAI to turn over the logs of Van Rootselaar’s interactions with ChatGPT. He has also said they are inviting Altman and his leadership team to Tumbler Ridge to witness how the shooting has devastated the town.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

The cases were filed in the U.S. District Court in Northern California.