Survivors of a mass shooting in British Columbia filed 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI this week, contending that the company should have notified the police when it shut down the shooter’s disturbing ChatGPT account eight months before the attack.
The lawsuits significantly expand a legal fight against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, that began in April when victims’ families filed seven lawsuits claiming the company could have prevented the shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School on Feb. 10.
That day, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, took two guns from her home in Tumbler Ridge, a remote town roughly 415 miles northeast of Vancouver, and killed her mother and 11-year-old brother, the authorities said. She then went to the school and killed five students and an educational assistant and shot two other students.
Ms. Van Rootselaar died in the school of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the authorities said.
OpenAI has acknowledged that in June 2025, eight months before the attack, it shut down Ms. Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account after an automated system detected “a violation of our usage policy.” But company officials did not contact the authorities.
“Based on what we could see at that time the account was banned in June 2025, we did not identify credible and imminent planning that met our threshold to refer the matter to law enforcement,” OpenAI’s vice president of global policy, Ann M. O’Leary, wrote in a letter to Canada’s artificial intelligence minister in February.
The lawsuits, citing a report in The Wall Street Journal, contend that some OpenAI employees were urging the company to contact the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. But the lawsuits say that OpenAI’s leaders overruled members of the company’s internal safety team.
“Sam Altman and his leadership team knew what silence meant for the citizens of Tumbler Ridge, but they were more concerned about what disclosure meant for themselves,” one of the lawsuits states. “Warning the R.C.M.P. would set a precedent the company deemed unacceptable, as OpenAI would be compelled to notify authorities every time its safety team identified a user planning real-world violence.”
It is not clear what content on the attacker’s ChatGPT account prompted OpenAI to remove it. But The New York Times reported in February that Ms. Van Rootselaar had posted on other platforms about her mental health problems, drug use and fascination with weapons and extreme violence.
In April, Mr. Altman wrote an open letter apologizing to the community of Tumbler Ridge.
“I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June,” he wrote. “While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered.”
The new lawsuits were brought by educators, a principal and students at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, including siblings who were separated during the attack, and a teacher and her nephew who shared the same classroom that day. One of the plaintiffs, who was 13 at the time of the shooting, played dead as his classmates were killed in the library.
British Columbia’s premier, David Eby, said the suits were filed after OpenAI walked away from a mediation process.
“It underlines why these companies cannot be trusted,” Mr. Eby said on Tuesday, according CityNews Vancouver. “They can’t be trusted to regulate themselves; they can’t be trusted in what they say.”
In response to a request for comment on the lawsuits, OpenAI pointed to a post on X by its chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon. Mr. Kwon wrote that the company has been “approaching this litigation with respect for both the legal process and the families and victims of this tragedy, and we’ll continue to engage in good faith with that process.”
Mr. Kwon added that OpenAI’s intelligence and investigation team and its legal department “work hard to define standards and processes for when to report cases to law enforcement and to apply those standards to really difficult and complex situations.”
“They work continuously to identify potential warning signals of serious violence, while also protecting the privacy and security of the vast majority of the more than one billion users who use our tools responsibly,” Mr. Kwon wrote.
(The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims. This week, the Justice Department sided with OpenAI.)
Deidre Rushlow, who taught English and humanities at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, is one of the plaintiffs in the 30 lawsuits stemming from the shooting, which were filed in Federal District Court in San Francisco, where OpenAI is based.
Before the attack, Ms. Rushlow had sent her students to the library with her educational assistant, never imagining “they were living their final moments,” she said in a statement released by her law firm, Edelson P.C.
“What is done cannot be undone,” she added. “We will not forgive, we will not forget, and we certainly will not rest until every last individual at OpenAI who was complicit in the Tumbler Ridge shooting has been brought to justice.”
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