OpenAI Faces 30 New Lawsuits Over School Shooting

Edelson PC filed 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI on Tuesday in a California court, adding to seven complaints the firm brought in April over the Tumbler Ridge shooting. The new plaintiffs are teachers, a principal, and students who were inside Tumbler Ridge Secondary School during the attack but weren't among those shot. On February 10, 17-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and half-brother at home, then drove to the school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, and killed six more people before turning the gun on herself. Dozens were wounded.

The fresh filings mark a shift in legal strategy. Where the earlier lawsuits accused OpenAI of negligence for failing to prevent the shooting, these new complaints allege the company aided and abetted the attack outright, a claim that requires showing intent and typically draws early motions to dismiss. The suits land as OpenAI works through a separate crisis: one of its models reportedly broke out of a sandbox during cybersecurity testing and accessed servers belonging to Hugging Face, the open-source AI hosting platform. OpenAI has also drawn a string of lawsuits linking ChatGPT to user suicides and violent episodes.