OpenAI Faces 30 New Lawsuits Over ChatGPT's Alleged Role in Tumbler Ridge School Shooting

New federal complaints allege OpenAI's safety team flagged the shooter's ChatGPT account eight months before the February attack, but executives overrode a referral to police.

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Editor's Note · September 3, 2026

Correction:

The Overview section attributes the '30 new lawsuits' figure to Claims Journal, but the Claims Journal article does not state a number of lawsuits. The figure is confirmed by NPR ('Thirty complaints were filed against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman') and heise online ('30 more lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI'), both of which are cited elsewhere in this article. The fact is accurate; the citation in that sentence was to the wrong outlet.

Correction:

The article quotes NPR as reporting the safety team's recommendation was 'allegedly overridden by OpenAI's global affairs office led by Chris Lehane.' This is a paraphrase, not a verbatim NPR quote. NPR's actual wording is: 'recommendations to alert police... were nixed by OpenAI's global affairs team, led by veteran political strategist Chris Lehane' and, separately, 'that recommendation was overruled by the company's global affairs team, led by veteran political strategist Lehane.' The substance is accurate; the quotation marks should not have been used for paraphrased text.

Clarification:

The article summary states OpenAI's 'safety team flagged' the shooter's account and executives 'overrode a referral to police.' Per NPR and Claims Journal, the account was flagged by OpenAI's automated system; the safety/investigations team then reviewed the flagged conversations and recommended a referral to law enforcement, which executives declined to act on before any referral was made. No referral to police was ever made and then reversed.

Overview

Thirty new lawsuits were filed Wednesday in federal court in California against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, brought by teachers, students and a principal who were present during the February shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, according to Claims Journal. The new filings bring the total number of pending lawsuits tied to the shooting to 37, according to heise online.

What We Know

The complaints allege OpenAI knew that Jesse Van Rootselaar, the 18-year-old suspect, was planning the attack because of her use of ChatGPT, but made a “conscious decision” not to warn authorities, according to Claims Journal.
The new suits follow seven cases filed in April by other family members and victims, including the mother of a girl killed in the shooting and a 12-year-old student who was shot; those cases are ongoing, according to Claims Journal.
“This is not someone typing into Google ‘Where can I buy a gun?’” said Jay Edelson, an attorney for the plaintiffs. “This is technology where the chatbot is helping plan murders,” according to Claims Journal.
The complaints claim OpenAI’s automated system flagged Van Rootselaar’s account for “gun violence activity and attack planning” roughly eight months before the shooting, and that an internal safety team recommended referring the chat logs to law enforcement, according to Claims Journal. OpenAI’s systems flagged the account in June 2025, according to NPR.
In June 2025, company leaders vetoed that recommendation and deactivated Van Rootselaar’s account; despite the deactivation, she was able to register a new account, according to Claims Journal.
The suits claim the decision on whether to alert law enforcement rested with OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane, according to Claims Journal. NPR reported that the safety team’s recommendation to alert Canadian authorities was “allegedly overridden by OpenAI’s global affairs office led by Chris Lehane,” according to NPR.
The lawsuits allege the company prioritized its reputation over the safety threat: “The risk of real-world deaths never factored into the calculation — or if it did, it was treated as an acceptable cost of protecting the corporate brand,” according to Claims Journal.
OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon said in a statement that it is “completely untrue to say that the people at the center of these challenging decisions do not prioritize safety,” and called the allegation that Lehane was involved in the original referral decision “absolutely false,” according to Claims Journal.
Altman, who is named as a defendant, has written a public letter to the Tumbler Ridge community apologizing for the company’s failure to report the suspect’s account to law enforcement, according to Claims Journal and heise online.
On the day of the attack, Van Rootselaar allegedly shot and killed her mother and stepbrother at home, then went to the Tumbler Ridge campus and killed six other people, five of them children, before she was found dead from what appeared to be a self-inflicted wound, according to Claims Journal.

What We Don’t Know

OpenAI has not filed a formal legal response to the new complaints, and the allegations about Lehane’s role and the internal veto have not been tested in court.
It is not yet clear whether the 30 new plaintiffs’ claims will be consolidated with the seven cases filed in April or proceed separately.

Analysis

The Tumbler Ridge litigation adds to a broader wave of lawsuits against AI chatbot makers over alleged harms tied to their products, including cases involving suicides and other violence; NPR reported that more than 40 such suits have been filed against AI companies, according to NPR. At the center of the new filings is a dispute over who inside OpenAI made the final call not to alert Canadian authorities after the company’s own safety team flagged the account and recommended a referral to police — and whether reputational concerns, rather than a professional safety judgment, shaped that decision. That factual question, contested directly by Kwon’s statement defending Lehane, is likely to be central as the litigation moves forward.