7 families sue OpenAI over Canada school shooting: Here’s why
OpenAI's internal safety team flagged the shooter's ChatGPT account eight months before the attack
Eight months before an 18-year-old opened fire at a secondary school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia killing five children, a teaching assistant, and two family members, and wounding 27 others OpenAI's internal safety team had already identified the shooter's ChatGPT account as a credible, real-world threat of gun violence.
According to whistleblowers cited in seven lawsuits filed Wednesday in a California federal court, trained safety experts flagged the account in June 2024, roughly eight months before the February shooting.
Under OpenAI's own protocols, credible threats of real-world violence are supposed to trigger law enforcement referrals particularly significant given that Canadian police had previously opened a file on the shooter and had already removed guns from their home on a prior occasion.
Instead, OpenAI deactivated the account. Then, according to the lawsuits, the company sent a customer support email explaining how the user could return to ChatGPT by registering with a new email address. Evidence submitted in the complaints indicates the shooter followed those instructions. OpenAI denies that support communications instruct banned users how to re-register.
The attack on Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in a rural mining town of around 2,000 people left five children and one teaching assistant dead at the school, in addition to the shooter's mother and brother killed at home beforehand. The shooter also died from apparent self-inflicted wounds.
Jay Edelson, the attorney leading the cross-border legal team representing the families, told Ars Technica the lawsuits were filed deliberately in California where OpenAI is headquartered to ensure that Altman faces a jury "of his neighbours". All seven complaints were filed in the same week, with more expected from additional injured families within three weeks.
Edelson alleged that OpenAI's conduct has been shaped by one overriding priority: reaching its IPO currently targeting a valuation of $852 billion without the public understanding the scale of ChatGPT-linked violence cases the company is managing internally.
"Their goal has been to reduce the number of visible incidents where their platform caused deaths," he alleged, adding that without whistleblowers, the Tumbler Ridge connection to ChatGPT would likely never have surfaced.
Altman issued a public apology to Tumbler Ridge residents last week, calling OpenAI's failure to alert law enforcement a mistake and promising reforms. Edelson called the apology "ridiculous" and noted it came a month after Altman had already privately agreed with the town's mayor that one was necessary.
