Family of Tumbler Ridge shooting victim sues OpenAI

Families of victims of the shooting in Tumbler Ridge OpenAIOnly a few days after Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, after the deadly shooting at a school on 10. February had written a public apology to the population of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, sue the families of victims of the traumatic event OpenAI for negligence.

In the mass shooting, one of the most deadly in Canadian history, the suspected shooter, the 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, the local high school of the city, killed five students and a teacher and injured two more hard before taking life. The local police later realized that Van Rootselaar had killed her mother and her eleven-year-old half-brother before entering school.

According to NPR, lawyers representing some of the Tumbler Ridge families filed six different complaints on Wednesday at a federal court in San Francisco. In one of the complaints filed on behalf of Maya Gebala, a survivor of the shooting, it is claimed that the automated security systems of OpenAI Van Rootselaars ChatGPT-Conversations in June 2025, more than half a year before they entered the city's high school with a long weapon and a modified rifle, marked for "activity and planning of weapons violence". Furthermore, OpenAI’s security team has asked management to contact the authorities, but instead the company decided to deactivate the Van Rootselaar account. Later she created a second account and made her conversations with ChatGPT continue.

“The events in Tumbler Ridge are a tragedy. We have a zero tolerance policy for the use of our tools to support the exercise of violence,” said an OpenAI spokesman against Engadget. “As we told Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our security precautions, including improving the way ChatGPT reacts to signs of distress, linking people with local support and resources for mental health, strengthening the way we evaluate and escalate potential violence and improving the recognition of repeaters.”

On late Tuesday, OpenAI published a blog post that outlines its security policy. “In the context of this ongoing work, we have further developed our protective measures to help ChatGPT better identify subtle signs of damage risks in different contexts. Some security risks become clear only at the time: a single message may seem harmless, but a wider pattern within a long conversation – or between conversations – may indicate something more worrying,” the company wrote.

The actions submitted on Wednesday are the latest attempt to take OpenAI into account with the legal system for designing its products. Last summer, the parents of Adam Raine, a teenager who committed suicide in 2025, filed the first known lawsuit for illegal killing against an AI company. They claimed that ChatGPT had knowledge of four previous suicide attempts by Raine before he was finally successful.