Thursday, September 3, 2026
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OpenAI Faces Slew of Cases Over Canadian School Shooting
By Kimber Cooley, associate editor
Dozens of complaints were filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against San Francisco-based OpenAI Foundation and its founder, San Altman, over a deadly February school shooting in British Columbia that the plaintiffs allege might have been prevented if the company had followed urgings by employees to report the shooter to police based on interactions with the firm’s artificial intelligence tool, ChatGPT.
In all, 30 pleadings were lodged yesterday, each prepared by attorneys with the mass-action firm Edelson PC. The complaints are nearly identical and assert claims by educators and students relating to the Feb. 10 shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School that left five students and one staff member dead.
The plaintiffs assert that internal safety-team members flagged the account of then-seventeen-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, a transgender former student who was born male, eight months before the Feb. 10 incident. Van Rootselaar purportedly killed himself during the mass-shooting; he is also suspected of killing his mother and 11-year-old half-brother at the family home.
Seven other complaints were filed in April by family members of those killed in the shooting plus the mother of a survivor. Edelson PC represents all plaintiffs
Allegations in Complaint
One of the new plaintiffs, a thirteen-year-old student identified only as “A.C.,” alleged, by and through his next friend, Esther Braun:
“When the gunfire started,…A.C. was trapped inside the school library. He watched in horror as the Shooter entered the room and opened fire on the students and staff around him. A.C. watched the Shooter kill a teacher at close range, blowing off her hand and shooting her in the face, and then watched the Shooter kill his classmates, one after another….To survive, he played dead among his fallen classmates. After the Shooter moved on, A.C. was found by another teacher and was brought to a closet elsewhere in the school, where he sheltered for the rest of the lockdown beside the body of a deceased classmate.”
Other plaintiffs include teachers, like Keith Bertrand and Deidre Rushlow, and other staff members. They each assert causes of action under California law for negligence, negligent entrustment, and aiding and abetting a mass shooting, among other claims.
Tarasoff Case
Citing the 1976 California Supreme Court seminal case of Tarasoff v. Regents of University of California, the plaintiffs allege:
“By engaging in the unlicensed practice of therapy, psychology, and psychiatry, OpenAI created a special relationship with certain users, including the Shooter, and assumed a heightened duty to take action when confronted with knowledge of a credible and foreseeable threat to…the…victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting.”
Saying that “OpenAI identified that the Shooter’s original ChatGPT account had been used over a period of time to engage in conversations involving violence against third parties” and that “[m]embers of OpenAI’s safety team recognized that the Shooter’s [ChatGPT] usage presented a real-world risk of violence and urged OpenAI leaders to notify law enforcement,” they added:
“Despite the safety team’s urging, certain OpenAI leaders—whose identities are not yet known to Plaintiff and will be identified through discovery—chose not to alert or warn law enforcement or any other authority about the risk of violence identified by their own safety systems and verified by their own personnel. On information and belief, the Shooter communicated to ChatGPT a serious threat of physical violence against reasonably identifiable victims.”
Flagged Account
Ten days after the shooting, OpenAI confirmed that an account connected with Van Rootelsaar was flagged in June 2025 for “abuse and detection and enforcement efforts.” The company admitted that it considered giving the information to law enforcement but indicated that further internal investigations revealed that the activity did not meet set criteria for a referral. What exactly triggered the initial flagging, as well as a subsequent deactivation of the account, has yet to be disclosed. YouTube later admitted that it removed a channel associated with the shooter after the deadly incident.
Altman issued a public apology to the community of Tumbler Ridge in April, saying:
“I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June. While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered.”
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