Survivors of the Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia shooting filed 30 federal lawsuits against OpenAI and Sam Altman, alleging the company should have alerted police when it shut down the shooter's ChatGPT account eight months before the February attack.
Thirty new federal complaints accuse OpenAI of helping enable a British Columbia school shooting by failing to report a user's violent ChatGPT exchanges to police, a claim that could set a duty-of-care precedent for AI platforms.
OpenAI disputes the allegations. "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," Jason Kwon, OpenAI's chief strategy officer, said in a statement, calling the lawsuits' claims about its safety teams "false."
The complaints, filed Wednesday in the Northern District of California, bring to 37 the number of suits tied to the Feb. 10 attack, in which 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed eight people and wounded 27. OpenAI's safety operation flagged Van Rootselaar's conversations involving gun violence in June 2025 and recommended contacting the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, according to the filings, but leadership instead deactivated the account without notifying authorities.
The cases turn on whether OpenAI assumed a duty by building systems to flag dangerous activity. Under California's negligent-undertaking doctrine, a company that voluntarily takes on safety measures can face liability if it performs that work carelessly and the failure raises the risk of harm. A ruling against OpenAI could force AI platforms to weigh police referrals against user privacy, reshaping content-monitoring obligations across the sector.
The new plaintiffs broaden the group to include students and educators inside Tumbler Ridge Secondary School during the attack, along with the family of a student who was shot. The filings allege OpenAI's Intelligence and Investigations team recommended contacting police but was overruled by company leadership, a chain of command they tie to Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane and Chief Executive Sam Altman. OpenAI has said Lehane was not involved in the original referral decision and that Van Rootselaar's activity did not meet its threshold for an imminent and credible risk of serious harm warranting law enforcement contact. Altman has apologized to the community for the decision not to alert Canadian police.
The complaints press negligence, aiding and abetting, and product liability claims. Negligence requires showing OpenAI owed a duty of reasonable care, breached it, and caused harm — a harder case when the direct harm came from a third party. Aiding and abetting carries a higher bar under California law, demanding knowledge of wrongful conduct and substantial assistance, not merely a failure to prevent it. The product liability claims ask whether traditional rules governing defective goods can apply to an AI service, a question federal courts have yet to resolve.
OpenAI is separately fighting more than 50 lawsuits alleging ChatGPT caused psychological harm, injury, or death, including cases tied to a 2025 shooting at Florida State University, a murder-suicide in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a stalking complaint. Google and chatbot startup Character.AI face similar suits over alleged harm to users. OpenAI has asked the federal court to dismiss the earlier Tumbler Ridge cases so the litigation can proceed in British Columbia, arguing most witnesses and records are in Canada.
The 37 complaints remain pending in Northern California, with damages not yet disclosed. If the court lets the negligent-undertaking claims proceed, AI companies that build threat-detection systems could face a legal duty to escalate findings to authorities — a standard that would raise compliance costs and force a public-safety calculus into product design across the industry.
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