New lawsuits allege employees urged company to notify authorities months before deadly Tumbler Ridge attack
Families of seven victims of a mass shooting at a secondary school in British Columbia are suing OpenAI and the company’s CEO for negligence after it failed to alert authorities to the shooter’s troubling conversations with ChatGPT.
The lawsuits, filed on Wednesday in a federal court in San Francisco, allege that the violent intentions of the shooter, identified as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, were well-known to OpenAI. Employees at the company flagged the shooter’s account eight months before the attack and determined that it posed “a credible and specific threat of gun violence against real people”, according to the lawsuit.
The families allege that employees urged Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, and other senior leaders to notify Canadian law enforcement eight months before the attack, but the company decided not to warn authorities and deactivated the shooter’s account instead. Much of this is based on accounts that employees inside the company told the Wall Street Journal.
The decision to not alert law enforcement led to the devastation of the rural community of Tumbler Ridge, the suit alleges, where on 10 February the shooter stormed the secondary school with a modified rifle and opened fire. They shot the first person they came across in a stairwell, and proceeded to the library, where they killed five others and injured 27 more. The shooter then killed themself.
