The lawyer representing multiple victims of a school shooting in British Columbia said his firm planned to file up to two dozen more lawsuits against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, arguing the company was negligent for failing to warn authorities after the shooter’s violent interactions with ChatGPT months earlier.
Altman has apologized for failing to warn authorities about the mass shooter’s activities months earlier.
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In multiple suits filed Wednesday in federal district court in San Francisco, families of some victims killed and injured in February’s deadly shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada, alleged that OpenAI’s ChatGPT “played a role in the mass shooting and OpenAI could have, and should have, prevented it.”
Jay Edelson, the lawyer representing the victims, said his firm plans to file as many as two dozen more lawsuits in the coming weeks, insisting “the best they [OpenAI] can offer is an empty corporate apology as they sprint toward their IPO.”
The complaints filed on Wednesday allege multiple counts of negligence, product liability, wrongful death and aiding and abetting a mass shooting.
Days following the Feb. 10 deadly shooting, the Wall Street Journal published a report detailing how the shooter’s ChatGPT account was banned after it was flagged by an internal review system, but OpenAI leadership ultimately decided not to contact local police—with a spokesperson for the company telling the newspaper the account didn’t meet its criteria for reporting to law enforcement.
Last week, Altman apologized to the community in a note published in local newsletter Tumbler Ridgelines, where he said he was “deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June.”
In a statement sent to Forbes, Edelson said OpenAI and Altman “refuse to provide any answers, have not lifted a single finger to help the community, and have taken no concrete steps to make us believe tragedies like this won't keep happening on their watch.”
“We have a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence,” an OpenAI spokesperson told multiple outlets in a statement. “As we shared with Canadian officials, we have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat policy violators."
On Feb. 10, an 18-year-old named Jesse Van Rootselaar in the town of Tumbler Ridge, hundreds of miles northeast of Vancouver in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, shot and killed her mother and brother at home. Van Rootselaar then traveled to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and opened fire again, ultimately killing seven more people including herself and injuring at least 27 more. It marked Canada’s deadliest school shooting since the École Polytechnique shooting in Montreal in 1989.
OpenAI is planning an IPO, which could value the AI firm at up to $1 trillion, Reuters reported last year. The lawsuits filed on Wednesday allege the news of another instance of violence connected to OpenAI’s products could “derail” the offering. “The features that make ChatGPT unsafe—its willingness to engage on any topic, to validate any user, to sustain any fixation over time—are the same features that have made it one of the most popular products in history,” the suit argues.
The complaint alleges victims only found out about the shooter’s use of ChatGPT because of the Wall Street Journal reporting. “Sadly, the victims didn’t learn this because OpenAI was forthcoming, but because its own employees leaked it to the Wall Street Journal after they could no longer stomach the company’s silence,” the complaint reads. In the report from February, the Journal reported the shooter’s posts with the chatbot “alarmed” employees, and about a dozen debated whether to contact local authorities. The lawsuit makes a similar claim, insisting OpenAI “knew the Shooter was planning the attack and, after a contentious internal debate, made the conscious decision not to warn authorities.”
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