New lawsuits accuse OpenAI of prioritizing PR over safety in Tumbler Ridge shooting

New lawsuits brought against OpenAI on Wednesday over a school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, accuse the ChatGPT maker's executives of putting its public image ahead of public safety.

Thirty complaints were filed against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in a San Francisco federal court by people present at the shooting, including students, teachers and a principal. In April, families of seven other victims injured or killed in the February 2026 shooting sued OpenAI and Altman for failing to notify law enforcement of the alleged shooter's violent conversations with ChatGPT and aiding and abetting the shooting.

The new lawsuits make similar claims against OpenAI and Altman. But they also make new allegations that officials responsible for OpenAI's public relations, including chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane, overrode its safety team's recommendation that it refer the account to the authorities.

"What these complaints show is the larger impact and how many people's lives were really destroyed, all based on decisions made by people at OpenAI," said Jay Edelson, the lead attorney representing the Tumbler Ridge victims and their families.

OpenAI disputed the claims about the company's internal decision-making.

"It's so frustrating to see one of the lawyers currently suing OpenAI make false claims not only about these teams, but individuals who were not involved in the process," Jason Kwon, OpenAI's chief strategy officer, said in an emailed statement to NPR.

"As just one example, it is absolutely false to say Chris Lehane was involved with our original referral decision, or that our investigators report to him in any way. It's also completely untrue to say that the people at the center of these challenging decisions do not prioritize safety, or that there are 'political' or 'public relations' factors at play," Kwon said. "We've been approaching this litigation with respect for both the legal process and the families and victims of this tragedy, and we'll continue to engage in good faith with that process."

Alleged shooter was flagged by OpenAI's systems

The Tumbler Ridge shooting was among the worst in Canadian history. The alleged shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed five students and a teacher before killing herself, according to authorities. Around two dozen others were injured. Authorities later learned that Van Rootselaar had also killed her mother and 11-year-old half-brother at their home prior to coming to the school.

Eight months before the shooting, in June 2025, OpenAI's automated systems flagged Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT account for "gun violence activity and planning," according to one of the April lawsuits filed on behalf of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old catastrophically injured at the school. OpenAI deactivated the account, but Van Rootselaar created a second account and continued to have conversations with ChatGPT, OpenAI has said. The company says it was not aware of the second account until after the shooting in February.

The Tumbler Ridge plaintiffs allege that when OpenAI's Intelligence and Investigations team reviewed the alleged shooter's conversations with ChatGPT that were flagged last June, they determined they "posed a credible threat of gun violence against real people" and recommended the company alert the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The new complaints allege that recommendation was overruled by the company's global affairs team, led by veteran political strategist Lehane, which is responsible for public relations, public policy and political relationships.

The complaints allege that Lehane and Altman approve decisions about whether to refer safety concerns to law enforcement. "As a result, the decision whether to alert law enforcement to a user planning a mass attack was not made by the trained threat-assessment professionals who urged OpenAI to contact the RCMP. It was made, on information and belief, by Lehane himself, or by someone in his chain of command, and ratified by Sam Altman," said one of the complaints filed by Deidre Rushlow, a seventh-grade teacher at the school.

"Instead of focusing on what's safe for the community, he's focused on, what are the political and public relations fallout going to be if this becomes public?" Edelson said of Lehane, who is not named as a defendant in the suit.

Kwon denied Lehane's involvement. He said OpenAI's Intelligence and Investigations team and legal department report to him and "work hard to define standards and processes for when to report cases to law enforcement and to apply those standards to really difficult and complex situations." He said the teams work to identify warning signs of violence while protecting users' privacy, and partner with mental health, behavioral and law enforcement experts to inform the company's policies.

He added: "The professionals working on these teams choose to do this incredibly difficult work because they care so deeply about keeping people safe. They come to work every day knowing that they may have to make a decision that they'll think about for the rest of their lives."

"There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about what happened at Tumbler Ridge, or the victims of this devastating tragedy and their families," Kwon said.

In a statement provided in response to the first set of Tumbler Ridge lawsuits filed in April, OpenAI said it had a "zero tolerance" policy for using its tools to assist in committing violence and had strengthened its safeguards and how ChatGPT responds to signs of distress. At the time, the company put out a blog post about its safety policies, noting that "When conversations indicate an imminent and credible risk of harm to others, we notify law enforcement."

Altman also apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community for not alerting law enforcement about the alleged shooter's account when OpenAI first flagged it.

AI companies face a growing wave of lawsuits

The Tumbler Ridge lawsuits are part of a growing effort to hold artificial intelligence companies accountable when harms follow users' interactions with chatbots.

Prior to the newest set of complaints filed on Wednesday, more than 30 lawsuits have been filed in federal and state courts against OpenAI and other AI companies over suicides, mass shootings and other mental or physical harms involving chatbot users, according to NPR's review of legal filings. The majority of the cases involve OpenAI's ChatGPT.

In June, the state of Florida sued OpenAI and Altman for failing to warn users that ChatGPT could be dangerous and instead marketed it as safe and reliable, including for children, in the first lawsuit brought against the company by a state.

Florida's attorney general is also conducting a separate criminal investigation into OpenAI over a shooting last year at Florida State University in which the accused gunman allegedly consulted ChatGPT for advice.

Tim Marple, who worked on OpenAI's investigations team in 2024, said incidents like Tumbler Ridge expose the risks of letting AI companies self-regulate, rather than requiring them to report violent threats on their platforms. Marple is now the co-director of Maiden Labs, a nonprofit that works to identify AI risks.