Families of Tumbler Ridge shooting victims sue OpenAI over failure to alert police

Seven families of Tumbler Ridge school shooting victims in Canada have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Chief Executive Sam Altman, accusing the company of negligence for failing to alert police to the suspected shooter's ChatGPT activity. The families allege OpenAI remained silent after its systems flagged the suspect, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, in order to protect the company's reputation and its upcoming initial public offering. The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had considered flagging the suspect's conversations about gun violence to authorities but decided against it. The lawsuits accuse OpenAI of misrepresenting its response to Van Rootselaar's activity. The company deactivated the suspect's account but allegedly did not prevent him from creating a new one under a different email. The families claim the shooter "simply followed OpenAI's own instructions to create a new account after being banned," and that no meaningful safeguards existed. The families also claim GPT-4o's "defective" design contributed to the mass shooting, citing OpenAI's rollback of a GPT-4o update last year after finding the model to be "overly flattering or agreeable." They are suing OpenAI and Altman for wrongful death and aiding and abetting a mass shooting. Altman apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community last week, saying he was "deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June." He said the company would continue working with government to prevent similar incidents.