More victims from the deadly Canadian school shooting in February are suing OpenAI, alleging the ChatGPT-maker could have stopped the massacre by alerting police to the trans teen shooter’s troubling messages.
A new round of lawsuits filed in the Northern District of California on Wednesday builds on seven cases from April, in which families of victims killed in the shooting accused OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman of prioritizing profits over safety.
Jesse Van Rootselaar is the 18-year-old suspected shooter in the Tumbler Ridge attack, accused of killing five children and one adult in the school and severely wounding two more students, including a 12-year-old girl living with permanent cognitive and physical disabilities.
The new lawsuits were filed by people who witnessed the shooting – one of the deadliest in Canada in decades – at the British Columbia mining town’s secondary school, alleging they will forever live with trauma because of OpenAI’s negligence.
“The children and teachers at Tumbler Ridge woke up thinking they were going to a normal day of school. Hours later, they found themselves in a war zone,” Jay Edelson, the lawyer for victims of the shooting, told The Post in a statement.
“All of this happened because OpenAI created a dangerous product that encouraged a deranged teenager to plan and carry out a mass shooting. While its own safety team urged OpenAI – twice – to alert the authorities before the shooting occurred, its political and PR team overrode them.”
Deirdre Rushlow, a seventh-grade teacher at the school, sheltered students under her desk and watched as the shooter fired bullets through the classroom doors, striking “the wall behind her and her students’ heads,” according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday. She texted her husband goodbye, “certain she was about to die,” the suit said.
D.I., a 16-year-old student at the school, watched his teacher lay a jacket over a killed classmate and had to step over the victim’s body to evacuate the school, while A.C., a 13-year-old student, played dead among his fallen classmates to survive, the legal filings said.
OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon said in a Wednesday statement that the company’s investigations team works to identify potential warning signals of serious violence, partnering with mental health, behavioral and law enforcement experts to refine criteria.
“They use automated systems that leave the toughest calls to human judgment…That judgment is not infallible, but it is always rooted in looking out for this balance for people,” he said. “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.”
Kwon added that it’s “frustrating” to see a lawyer for the victims making “false claims,” saying it’s “completely untrue to say that the people at the center of these challenging decisions do not prioritize safety, or that there are ‘political’ or ‘public relations’ factors at play.”
The cases are just the latest in a growing pile of litigation against OpenAI and other tech firms, alleging their chatbots encouraged users to commit suicide, harm themselves or harm others.
In June, seven months before the Tumbler Ridge shooting, Van Rootselaar’s conversations with ChatGPT had grown so concerning and violent that the company deactivated the account – but it did not alert authorities, according to court papers and the Wall Street Journal’s reporting.
Van Rootselaar, a transgender woman, was found dead at the scene of the shooting after turning the gun on himself. He had first killed his mother and 11-year-old half-brother at their home in the quiet mining town of roughly 2,500 residents.
OpenAI has said it discovered a second ChatGPT account the suspect was using after the initial account was switched off.
A total of 12 employees from ChatGPT’s safety team allegedly “urged” the company to inform Canadian police about Van Rootselaar before the shooting, according to court filings.
But OpenAI chose not to alert authorities, worried it “would set a precedent” that would compel OpenAI to notify authorities every time its safety team identified a user planning violence, the filings said.
OpenAI has said it has since bolstered safety protocols, and under the new rules, Van Rootselaar’s account would be flagged to authorities if the activity took place today.
In April, Altman apologized to the residents of Tumbler Ridge in a letter, writing he was “deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June.”
Edelson, the victims’ attorney, said OpenAI should immediately implement new safety measures on its platform and hold its leaders accountable for not warning authorities before the shooting.
He added that the victims’ families are asking OpenAI to turn over the full chat logs between Van Rootselaar and ChatGPT, and that Altman is welcome to visit Tumbler Ridge and see firsthand how the massacre has devastated the town.
New Corp, The Post’s parent company, has a content-licensing deal with OpenAI.
