Seven families whose children and loved ones were killed in a February school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, filed lawsuits Wednesday against OpenAI, the San Francisco company behind ChatGPT. The cases, filed in federal court in San Francisco, allege that OpenAI's handling of the shooter's account helped enable the attack.
The shooting happened on Feb. 10, when an 18-year-old former student entered a secondary school and opened fire with a modified handgun, killing five children and an education assistant. Investigators say she had also killed her mother and half-brother before arriving at the school. The shooter died at the scene from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. The combined death toll made it one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canadian history.
Before the attack, the shooter had engaged ChatGPT in conversations involving violence. Her account was later flagged in 2025 for misusing the platform for "violent activities" and was banned. But OpenAI determined at the time that the account "did not pose an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others" and chose not to contact law enforcement. According to The Guardian, the shooter had also created a second account that OpenAI was unaware of until after the attack.
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman wrote directly to the victims' families in a letter published by the local news site Tumbler RidgeLines. "The pain your community has endured is unimaginable," he wrote. He acknowledged the failure explicitly: "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June."
The company says it has since made changes. "We have already strengthened our safeguards, including improving how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress, connecting people with local support and mental health resources, strengthening how we assess and escalate potential threats of violence, and improving detection of repeat policy violators," an OpenAI spokesperson told CNET.
The lawsuits arrive as OpenAI faces scrutiny over a second incident. Florida officials announced in April that they are investigating whether a shooter who killed two people at Florida State University in Tallahassee also used ChatGPT before the attack. The cases raise overlapping questions about what obligations AI companies have when their products show signs of potential misuse.
OpenAI is also managing separate legal pressure on multiple fronts. Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica filed a lawsuit in March alleging the company improperly used copyrighted material to train its AI systems. CNET's parent company, Ziff Davis, filed a similar copyright suit in 2025.
The Tumbler Ridge lawsuits could set a significant precedent for how courts treat AI company liability when a user causes harm after interacting with a chatbot. No trial date has been set.
