OpenAI Gets Sued Over a School Shooting It Could Have Prevented

Seven families from the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada have had enough of OpenAI’s silence. They’re suing the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, for negligence after ChatGPT allegedly flagged the suspect’s violent conversations and nobody did a damn thing about it.

The suspect, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, was reportedly having conversations with ChatGPT about gun violence before he opened fire. OpenAI’s systems caught it. The company “considered” flagging it to police, according to the Wall Street Journal. But they didn’t. The families say OpenAI kept quiet to protect its reputation and its upcoming IPO.

Let that sink in. A company that builds one of the most powerful language models on earth sees a user talking about shooting up a school, thinks about telling someone, and then decides to let it slide because they’re worried about the stock price. If that’s true, it’s not just negligence. It’s a moral failure.

Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been watching AI liability cases crawl through courts for years, and this one has legs. The families aren’t just suing for damages. They’re arguing that OpenAI had a duty to act once its systems flagged credible threats. The company’s internal hesitation — documented in the WSJ report — makes that argument a lot harder for OpenAI to dodge.

OpenAI’s response so far has been predictably corporate. They say they’re cooperating with law enforcement and that they take safety seriously. But if you’ve been following this space, you know that’s the same company that gutted its safety teams, rushed out GPT-4o with half-baked guardrails, and keeps talking about AGI like it’s a party trick. Their track record on safety is not great.

This case is going to force a conversation the industry has been avoiding. When does a flagged conversation cross the line from “disturbing but protected speech” to “we need to call the cops”? And who gets to make that call? If it’s the AI company, they need clear policies and, more importantly, the spine to follow through. If it’s law enforcement, they need a way to get that data without waiting for a tragedy.

Right now, we have neither. OpenAI had the data, saw the risk, and chose silence. The families of Tumbler Ridge are asking the court to make that silence cost something. I hope they win.