Tumbler Ridge mass shooting victims file 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI

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.