Families sue OpenAI over failure to report Canada mass shooter’s behavior on ChatGPT

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.