Thirty new complaints come from survivors of a Canadian school shooting. They accuse OpenAI of failing to warn police; the company disputes key claims.
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OpenAI is now fighting more than 50 lawsuits in which people allege that prolonged use of ChatGPT contributed to psychological injury, physical harm, or death. The latest wave is unusually large: 30 new complaints came from survivors and families connected to the February school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia.
The shooting killed eight people and wounded 27. The new plaintiffs include people who were inside the school but were not physically shot. Their complaints accuse OpenAI of negligence and, for the first time in this case, of aiding and abetting the attack.
The plaintiffs say ChatGPT encouraged the shooter’s violent thinking and that OpenAI failed to alert Canadian police after its staff reviewed conversations about gun violence and attack planning. OpenAI deactivated the account, but the shooter opened another one. The company says the activity did not meet its threshold for an “imminent and credible risk” that would justify contacting law enforcement.
Important facts remain unresolved. The shooter’s ChatGPT logs have not been made public. The new aiding-and-abetting claim requires evidence of intent and is expected to face an early challenge. One complaint also alleges that OpenAI executive Chris Lehane helped stop a police referral; OpenAI says that claim is false and that Lehane was not involved.
OpenAI executive Jason Kwon said the company uses automated systems and human judgment to balance public safety with user privacy. He acknowledged that this judgment is not infallible.
These cases join lawsuits involving suicides, severe mental-health crises, stalking, and other shootings. None has yet established that ChatGPT legally caused the alleged harm. Together, however, they are forcing a concrete question that voluntary safety policies leave unanswered: when a chatbot provider sees signs of possible violence or self-harm, what does it owe the user, potential victims, and law enforcement?
If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, call or text 988 in the United States or Canada. Elsewhere, contact local emergency or crisis services.
Twelve states have passed companion-chatbot laws
The legal response is already moving beyond individual lawsuits. Twelve US states have passed laws aimed at companion chatbots, the systems designed to sustain personal or emotional conversations over time. Laws are already in effect in New York, California, and Hawaii; nine more take effect in 2027.
All 12 require a clear disclosure that the user is talking to AI, not a person. They also require protocols for detecting expressions of suicide or self-harm and directing users to crisis resources. Most add protections for minors, including restrictions on sexual content, emotional manipulation, and features designed to maximize engagement.
The laws are not uniform. Washington bars a covered chatbot from claiming to be human to any user. Colorado and Georgia require some form of age estimation. Oregon requires additional intervention when a user continues to express suicidal or self-harm intent after receiving crisis information. For providers, “we have a safety policy” is becoming a set of duties that regulators and courts can examine.
Uber drivers say the algorithm learns how little they will accept
A proposed European class action covering about 241,000 Uber drivers alleges that the company profiles individual workers to set pay and allocate jobs. Filed in Amsterdam, the case seeks damages and an order stopping practices the claim says violate European data-protection law.
One London driver described seeing the same trip offered to another driver for £27 while he was offered £23. The plaintiffs argue that Uber’s system learns which drivers are likely to accept cheaper fares and uses that information to push their pay down. They say dynamic pricing has reduced annual UK earnings by about £5,000.
Uber categorically rejects the allegations. It says prices are calculated from information about the trip—including duration, destination, demand, promotions, and testing—not from a driver’s history of accepting or rejecting work. The court will have to examine a system that acts like a manager while revealing far less than a human manager would about how a pay decision was made.
Fake citations are entering parliamentary evidence
Australian parliamentary inquiries invite submissions from experts, organizations, and the public. Legislators use that material when investigating subjects ranging from housing to domestic violence.
The Guardian found at least 39 submissions containing references that appeared to be invented by AI. Its reporters extracted citations from every submission to the current parliament, checked them against academic databases, and manually reviewed documents with many unmatched references. Some submissions contained a few bad citations; in others, every cited source appeared not to exist.
More than 100 submissions also contained ChatGPT tags in copied links, although those tags do not prove who originally used the tool. In one case, Google’s AI summary described a fabricated academic paper as if it were real, using the inquiry submission that invented it as a source. The error had begun to authenticate itself.
ChatGPT can now read Epic patient records
Healthcare organizations can connect authorized Epic patient records to ChatGPT for Healthcare. Clinicians can ask for a pre-visit summary, a timeline, medication information, or changes since the last appointment without leaving the patient chart in some deployments.
The access is read-only: ChatGPT cannot write information back into Epic. OpenAI says physicians rated 99.1 percent of more than 4,300 test responses as safe across 27 clinical tasks. That is a company-run evaluation, and “safe” does not mean every detail was correct. The practical test is whether hospitals can catch an omitted result or a misleading summary before it changes care.
A US policy report is already gaming out attacks on AI data centers
A Center for a New American Security report asks what the United States should do if China appeared close to building artificial general intelligence. It assumes a hypothetical world in which AGI is imminent, then works through the consequences.
One scenario considers sabotage, cyberattacks, and, as the most dangerous option, bombing the rival state’s data centers. Its author, Jacob Stokes, also calls for the United States to prepare readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development. Four people in the Who’s Who network surfaced the story. The striking part is not a prediction about AGI. It is that a disputed technological premise is already being translated into military planning.
Wait, What?
Artist Simon Weckert printed blurry green and pink patterns on a shirt. During a live demonstration, object-detection software stopped labeling the wearer as a person when the fabric covered his torso, then recognized him again when it moved. Weckert made the “digital camouflage” in response to Berlin’s first police-run object-recognition cameras.
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— The AI Weekly team