Lawyers representing survivors of the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., say they are filing 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI, alleging the tech company was negligent in not reporting the shooter’s chat history to police before the attack, which left nine people dead. Vancouver law firm Rice Parsons Leoni and Elliott LLP says the new lawsuits, filed in a U.S. federal court in California, accuse the company and its CEO Sam Altman of failing to apply safeguards that could have prevented the shooting. The shooter’s use of the company’s ChatGPT chatbot before the shooting was concerning enough for the account to be banned, the company has admitted. But the ban was bypassed when the shooter opened a second account. “OpenAI’s own safety team identified the shooter as a credible threat of imminent gun violence eight months before the attack, recommended that the company call the RCMP, and were overruled by OpenAI’s leadership,” the law firm said in a statement Wednesday. The plaintiffs in the new cases include teachers, students and a principal at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where most of the victims were found after one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canadian history. “These students and teachers were eyewitnesses to gun violence, murder and emergency lifesaving efforts rarely seen outside of a theatre of war, and only in the most lawless of places on earth,” said lawyer John Rice on behalf of the complainants. The new lawsuits are in addition to seven cases filed in April against the artificial intelligence company on behalf of the victims who died in the attack. Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, killed two family members at her home in the northern B.C. community on Feb. 10, then travelled to the school where six others were shot dead before she killed herself. Teacher ‘haunted’ by memories Statements from the plaintiffs provided by the law firm describe scenes of horror as surviving students armed themselves with knives and tools against the attacker, while others hid among the dead. “My students were in the library when the shooting happened. I did not know, nor could I know, that when I sent them to the library with my educational assistant, they were living their final moments,” said teacher Deidre Rushlow. “My colleagues and I are haunted by the memory of shielding children with our own bodies as our ears rang from the sound of continual gunshots and high-pitched screams,” she continued. “An entire generation of young lives, gone in a second; their innocence drowned in blood and the acrid haze of gunpowder.” The law firm, working with American co-counsel Edelson LC, says the new lawsuits are seeking compensatory and punitive damages from OpenAI and the “prevention of another AI-facilitated mass shooting.” OpenAI says tragedy ‘sobering reminder’ Jay Edelson, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the U.S., says his clients are not seeking out-of-court settlements in the new cases, which will be heard separately by the same judge. “Our clients want a jury to hear what happened,” he told CTV News in an interview. “They want OpenAI to be held accountable, and that means publicly accountable.” In response to the new litigation, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer Jason Kwon says the company is approaching the cases with respect for both the legal process and the victims of the shooting. “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 said in a social media post. “It’s a constant and sobering reminder of the important and incredibly difficult work that many people in my team do each and every day.” Kwon says it is “completely untrue” to accuse those working at OpenAI of not prioritizing safety, adding the company’s intelligence and investigations teams work continuously to identify warning signs of potential violence, while also protecting user privacy. “They use automated systems that leave the toughest calls to human judgment,” he said. Attorney general supports lawsuits British Columbia’s attorney general on Wednesday slammed OpenAI in a statement welcoming the new lawsuits from witnesses to the tragedy. Niki Sharma accused the company of making “no meaningful efforts to address the harm” suffered in Tumbler Ridge, and said the provincial government supports the new legal claims against it. The attorney general said the province is still considering launching its own legal actions against the company and its leadership, but any such litigation would be separate from the cases initiated by community members. “We continue to work with our legal team in British Columbia and California to explore all available legal options to hold OpenAI and its decision-makers accountable for its documented failure to notify law enforcement regarding explicit, flagged threats made by the perpetrator on the company’s ChatGPT platform,” Sharma said. “These processes can proceed independently and in parallel while seeking accountability through different legal avenues.” The allegations against the company have not been proven or tested in court.
