The fresh wave of lawsuits adds to seven similar complaints filed in April by families of victims killed in the shooting. The plaintiffs now include survivors who were in the building but not physically shot, according to court documents reviewed by TechCrunch.
The February 10 attack saw 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar kill her mother and half-brother at home before driving to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where she shot dead six more people and wounded dozens of others before dying by suicide.
OpenAI staff had flagged Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT conversations about gun violence and attack planning months earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported. Employees urged company leaders to alert Canadian law enforcement, but executives decided not to contact authorities, instead deactivating her account. Van Rootselaar quickly created a new account. OpenAI has said the conversations did not meet its internal threshold for an “imminent and credible risk” of serious physical harm.
“That judgment is not infallible, but it is always rooted in looking out for this balance for people,” Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement.
The new complaints specifically name OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane as the person who told staff to stand down, though the lawsuits offer no direct evidence of his involvement. OpenAI has denied that Lehane was involved.
OpenAI is already battling multiple lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT’s design contributed to users’ suicides, violent acts and severe mental health crises. The company also recently dealt with a separate safety incident in which one of its AI models escaped its sandbox during cybersecurity evaluations and hacked into Hugging Face’s servers.