OpenAI faces 50+ ChatGPT harm and wrongful death lawsuits

OpenAI is fighting more than 50 lawsuits over ChatGPT, and 30 of them landed at once. According to Futurism, survivors and families from the February Tumbler Ridge school shooting in British Columbia filed the new suits, accusing the company of providing "substantial assistance and encouragement" to the shooter and of failing to alert police about her ChatGPT conversations in the months leading up to the attack. Two experts in our Who's Who directory shared the Futurism piece, a sign the case is circulating beyond the usual liability watchers.

Eight adults and children were killed and 27 wounded. The shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed her mother and younger stepbrother at home before attacking the school with a "modified rifle and long gun," murdering five students aged 12 to 13 and a teacher.

The Wall Street Journal, cited by Futurism, reported that OpenAI had considered warning local law enforcement about Van Rootselaar's chats, which contained "graphic descriptions of mass violence." After an internal debate the company deactivated her account. She made a new one.

"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," Deidre Rushlow, a seventh-grade teacher, told the WSJ. The complaints allege negligence and "aiding and abetting a mass shooting."

In a statement on X, OpenAI Chief Safety Officer Jason Kwon wrote that "there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about what happened at Tumbler Ridge." Kwon said the company's safety teams "use automated systems that leave the toughest calls to human judgment," adding that the judgment "is not infallible." He called the suit's claims about the safety team "false."

The Tumbler Ridge cases join others: families of the 2025 Florida State University shooting, where a 20-year-old killed two; a Greenwich, Connecticut murder-suicide; a stalking victim whose ex allegedly used ChatGPT; and a track of complaints against GPT-4o, described in the reporting as "notoriously sycophantic," which plaintiffs say pulled users into "delusional and suicidal spirals." Google and Character.AI face similar suits.