OpenAI was hit Wednesday with seven lawsuits in California state court alleging the company could have prevented one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canadian history. The complaints, filed on behalf of six families of victims killed and one mother of a child still in intensive care, claim OpenAI's internal safety team flagged the shooter's ChatGPT account as a credible gun-violence threat more than 8 months before the February 2026 attack in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. Leadership overruled the team and declined to notify law enforcement, the suits allege. The shooting killed 6 victims at the school and wounded 27.
The plaintiffs argue OpenAI's standard practice in such cases is to refer credible threats to police. Local authorities already had a file on the 18-year-old shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar, and had previously removed firearms from the home. According to whistleblowers cited by The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI executives concluded the user's privacy and the stress of a police encounter outweighed the risk of violence.
Instead, the company deactivated the account, then sent a follow-up explaining how to re-register with a different email address, the lawsuits allege. OpenAI denies that its support emails instruct users on re-registration. The company was most recently valued at $852 billion and is preparing to go public this year.
Key facts
- 01Seven lawsuits were filed Wednesday in California against OpenAI by families of victims of the Tumbler Ridge school shooting.
- 02OpenAI's safety team flagged the shooter's ChatGPT account 8 months before the February 2026 attack but leadership declined to notify police.
- 03The shooting killed 6 victims at the school, including 5 children and a teaching assistant, and wounded 27 others.
- 04Attorney Jay Edelson alleges OpenAI is sitting on $100 billion of liability while pursuing an IPO at an $852 billion valuation.
- 05Sam Altman issued a public apology last week, a month after agreeing with the Tumbler Ridge mayor that one was warranted.
Sam Altman addressed the 2,000-person mining town in a public apology last week. "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June," Altman wrote, pledging the company would "find ways to prevent tragedies like this in the future" and keep "working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again."
“OpenAI's whole strategy in these cases is just to delay as long as possible, attorney Jay Edelson said, accusing the company of sitting on $100 billion of liability ahead of its IPO.”— Jaeden Schafer
Jay Edelson, leading the cross-border legal team, called the apology "ridiculous" and said it arrived a month after Altman agreed with the Tumbler Ridge mayor that one was necessary. Edelson is consolidating cases in California to put OpenAI in front of a local jury, superseding an earlier suit filed in Canada where he expects the company to contest jurisdiction. "OpenAI's whole strategy in these cases is just to delay as long as possible," Edelson told Ars Technica.
Edelson alleges the company is suppressing visibility of violent ChatGPT incidents to protect Altman from negative headlines as the IPO approaches. "The goal is just to get to an IPO" without the public learning "that you're sitting on a hundred billion dollars of liability," he said. He called Altman "the face of evil" and predicted "historic" damages when verdicts land.
The human toll detailed in the filings is grim. Education assistant Shannda Aviugana-Durand was killed at close range in front of students. Three 12-year-old girls — Zoey Benoit, Ticaria Lampert, and Kylie Smith — died, with two requiring identification by their clothing. Abel Mwansa Jr., 12, told a witness, "Tell my parents that I love them so much." Ezekiel Schofield, 13, was also killed.
Maya Gebala, 12, was shot three times in the head, neck, and cheek and survived only because classmates hid her under a desk and flagged down rescuers. She has undergone 4 brain surgeries, cannot move or speak, and faces lifelong disabilities, according to the complaint filed by her mother, Cia Edmonds. "I would give anything to go back," Edmonds wrote. "I would give anything to have us whole again."
The lawsuits frame OpenAI's conduct as negligence under California law, which requires warnings "when a person has actual knowledge of a specific individual's serious and foreseeable threat to cause physical harm to another." The complaints also invoke a state statute barring the re-supply of a dangerous instrument to someone likely to misuse it. Plaintiffs are seeking to identify the OpenAI leaders who overruled the safety team's recommendation.
OpenAI's spokesperson called the events "a tragedy" and said the company has "a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence," citing strengthened safeguards around distress signals, threat escalation, and detection of repeat policy violators. The company has not addressed the central allegation — that reporting Van Rootselaar would have set a precedent forcing it to escalate similar threats at scale, an operational burden the suits say motivated the inaction.
The legal exposure here is harder to dismiss than prior ChatGPT-linked complaints because the alleged failure is procedural, not philosophical: a documented internal recommendation, overruled, followed by a mass-casualty event whose perpetrator the company had already flagged. That is the kind of fact pattern juries punish, and the kind plaintiffs' lawyers build careers around. Following last week's reporting on CFO Sarah Friar's clashes with Altman over the path to a 2026 IPO, the Tumbler Ridge cases add a different kind of pressure to the listing — one that compute contracts and revenue projections cannot offset, and one that Edelson is betting OpenAI will pay almost any price to keep out of a courtroom.
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