The Chicago plaintiffs' firm added 30 complaints this week tied to the British Columbia massacre, lifting its total against OpenAI to 37 and introducing an aiding-and-abetting theory alongside new non-injured plaintiffs.
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OpenAI faces 30 more Tumbler Ridge lawsuits as liability risk grows
Edelson PC this week filed 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI over the February Tumbler Ridge school shooting, escalating its claims from negligence to aiding and abetting and pushing the campaign to roughly 37 complaints seeking more than $1 billion in combined damages.
"We are not yet disclosing all the evidence," Jay Edelson, founding partner at Edelson PC, said. He said OpenAI's head of global affairs, Chris Lehane, and chief executive Sam Altman are being treated as important witnesses rather than defendants, even though the new filings name Lehane.
The new plaintiffs include teachers, a principal and students who were inside Tumbler Ridge Secondary School during the attack but were not physically shot, broadening the case beyond the families of the dead. The original seven lawsuits, filed April 29, alleged negligence, product liability and wrongful death. The 30 new complaints add an aiding-and-abetting theory that implies OpenAI actively helped the harm occur rather than merely failing to stop it — a legal bar that requires plaintiffs to prove intent.
The escalation rests on a specific allegation of prior knowledge. OpenAI's internal safety team flagged the ChatGPT account of shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar for violent content in June 2025, months before the Feb. 10 attack that killed eight people and injured at least 27 at the British Columbia school. Employees recommended contacting Canadian police, but the company only blocked the account, which Van Rootselaar was able to recreate. Each lawsuit requests a jury trial, a choice that puts the question of culpability before ordinary citizens rather than judges applying narrower legal reasoning.
The aiding-and-abetting threshold
OpenAI has said the account activity did not meet its internal standard of an "imminent and credible threat" of serious physical harm, the level at which it contacts law enforcement. Chief strategy officer Jason Kwon said the decision balanced people's safety against other circumstances. The plaintiffs counter that the company acted differently in November 2025, when it locked down its San Francisco office over a suspected threat from an activist and shared information with police despite no signs of an imminent attack.
The distinction matters because the aiding-and-abetting claim, if it survives an early motion to dismiss, would mark the first time an AI company is held liable for downstream violence tied to its product. OpenAI will likely seek to have that portion of the complaints thrown out at the outset, arguing the intent standard cannot be met.
What a precedent would mean for the AI sector
A $1 billion damages claim against a company valued in the hundreds of billions is not existential on its own. But a ruling that AI platforms can be liable as aiders and abettors when internal safety flags were raised and ignored would ripple across the sector, hitting rivals such as Anthropic, Google and Meta that run comparable safety pipelines. The practical costs would show up first in insurance premiums and compliance budgets, then in funding terms for private AI developers facing a new class of downstream liability.
Edelson PC appears to be betting that volume and escalation force a reckoning, whether in a courtroom or a settlement negotiation. For investors, the litigation adds a risk category that current AI valuations largely ignore: the possibility that platform operators, not just users, bear responsibility for how their models are deployed.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
