Tumbler Ridge mass shooting victims file 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI

Original article by Dara Kerr

OpenAI faces 30 new lawsuits filed on behalf of victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting.

The suits, filed on Wednesday, allege the company’s ChatGPT chatbot induced the shooter to carry out the attack in rural Canada in February, in which eight people were killed and dozens more wounded – most of them children.

“These were people who really endured just total hell that day,” Jay Edelson, the lead lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said in an interview. “Young kids who watched their teachers die, watched friends die and thought they were going to get shot and killed.”

These new lawsuits, filed in federal court for the northern district of California, come after Edelson filed seven initial suits in April – bringing the total number of cases against OpenAI for the Tumbler Ridge shooting to 37. All of the suits allege that the violent intentions of the shooter, identified as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, were well-known to the senior leadership of OpenAI, which failed to report her to the authorities.

Employees on the company’s safety team had flagged the shooter’s account to executives eight months before the attack, describing her in internal messages as “a credible and specific threat of gun violence against real people”, according to court filings. OpenAI banned her account, but she was able to quickly create a new one, the suits claim.

The lawsuits accuse OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of negligence, aiding and abetting a mass shooting and product liability.

Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement that he thinks about what happened at Tumbler Ridge every day and that the company works hard to create standards for reporting cases to law enforcement.

“The professionals working on these teams choose to do this incredibly difficult work because they care so deeply about keeping people safe,” Kwon said. “They come to work every day knowing that they may have to make a decision that they’ll think about for the rest of their lives.”

A groundswell of cases have been brought against OpenAI and other tech companies alleging that their chatbots exacerbate mental health crises and provoke violent acts. OpenAI has been sued in seven separate cases that blame ChatGPT for acting as a “suicide coach”. A criminal investigation and civil lawsuit, brought by the attorney general of Florida, accuses OpenAI of concealing safety risks after a mass shooting at Florida State University.

The shooting in Tumbler Ridge took place in a secondary school, shortly after Van Rootselaar killed her mother and 11-year-old brother in their family home. The new tranche of lawsuits includes cases from the family of one girl who was shot, along with the principal, teachers and students.

The attack was one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canadian history. In the aftermath, questions swirled in the small British Columbia town about how it could have happened.

Edelson singled out Chris Lehane, who is OpenAI’s head of global affairs and a former member of Bill Clinton’s administration who specialized in opposition research. He said Lehane was one of the people who received warnings from the company’s safety team but overruled repeated appeals to alert the authorities. That decision was also sanctioned by Altman, the lawsuits allege.

“What’s clear is that OpenAI over and over has made decisions to hide how dangerous their platform is because they’re worried about regulation and public pushback,” Edelson said.

In response, OpenAI’s Kwon said: “It is absolutely false to say Chris Lehane was involved with our original referral decision … It’s also 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.”

When the first seven lawsuits were filed against OpenAI in April, the company published a blog post about its “commitment to safety”. Altman also sent a letter to the Tumbler Ridge community apologizing for not notifying Canadian police about what OpenAI knew regarding the shooter’s potential threat.

“While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered,” Altman wrote.

David Eby, the British Columbia premier, posted the letter to social media with the comment: “The apology is necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge.”