OpenAI faces 30 new Tumbler Ridge lawsuits alleging it aided the school shooting

Thirty new complaints filed in California

Edelson PC, the firm behind seven April lawsuits against OpenAI on behalf of victims and families connected to the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, is filing 30 additional complaints this week, according to TechCrunch. The new plaintiffs include teachers, a school principal and students who were inside the building during the attack but were not physically wounded. The filings were made in a California court on Tuesday.

The legal theory escalates

For the first time, the complaints accuse OpenAI of aiding and abetting the shooting rather than merely failing negligently to prevent it. As TechCrunch notes, that framing requires proving intent on OpenAI's part and is expected to draw early motions to dismiss.

What happened at Tumbler Ridge

According to TechCrunch, the attack took place on February 10 in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. A teenager, Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed her mother and half-brother at home, then killed six more people and injured dozens at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School before dying by suicide.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported that OpenAI staff had grown alarmed by Van Rootselaar's use of ChatGPT, which included conversations about gun violence and advice on planning an attack. Employees reportedly pressed leadership to alert Canadian law enforcement, but leaders chose not to. The company deactivated her account instead, and she was reportedly able to open a new one shortly afterward.

OpenAI has said her activity did not meet the company's internal threshold of an "imminent and credible risk" of serious physical harm required before it engages with police. Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon, who oversees the human reviewer team and the legal department, said in a statement shared with TechCrunch that such judgments are not infallible but are consistently made while weighing people's interests.

The claim against Chris Lehane

The new complaints name Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane as the person who told staff not to contact the authorities. TechCrunch reports that the complaints offer no direct evidence he was personally involved, and OpenAI denies his involvement. Much of the allegation rests on "on information and belief," a legal phrase for claims plaintiffs believe to be true based on secondhand information they cannot yet prove directly.

One complaint argues that the Intelligence and Investigations Team, the only group inside OpenAI charged with identifying ChatGPT users who threaten real-world violence, sat under Lehane's control. As a result, plaintiffs contend, the decision over whether to alert Canadian police was made by Lehane or someone in his chain of command and ratified by CEO Sam Altman, rather than by the trained threat-assessment staff who wanted to call law enforcement. TechCrunch says it could not confirm whether Lehane actually holds authority to override the team or played any role in this case. Lehane is not listed as a defendant, though Altman is, as in the earlier complaints.

Lead attorney Jay Edelson told TechCrunch the firm is deliberately withholding evidence at this stage, saying the claim draws partly on the company's org chart and partly on what the investigation has learned about how Lehane operates internally, and that Lehane, Altman and the safety team will be key witnesses. The complaints also argue that Lehane's background in crisis communications, including work for the Clinton administration and Airbnb, reflects a culture at OpenAI that prioritizes reputation management over safety.

Kwon rejected those characterizations, telling TechCrunch it is false to say Lehane was involved in the original referral decision or that investigators report to him, and untrue that political or public-relatives factors influence these safety decisions.

Challenging OpenAI's stated defenses

The complaints also seek to undercut OpenAI's stated reasons for not contacting Canadian police: imminence and user privacy. They point to a November 2025 incident in which OpenAI locked down its San Francisco offices after an alleged threat from an activist, while acknowledging there was no sign of active threat activity. In that case, according to the complaints, the company immediately warned employees, circulated the person's name and photograph and notified San Francisco police. Plaintiffs argue the company neither waited for the threat to become imminent nor cited privacy when its own staff were at risk.

Why it matters

The litigation tied to this single incident now spans 37 complaints, and the new aiding-and-abetting theory, if it survives dismissal motions, would set a far more serious standard of culpability for AI providers than negligence, because it implies deliberate conduct rather than carelessness. The case also puts OpenAI's internal escalation process under judicial scrutiny: who decides when to contact police about a user, on what risk threshold, and how corporate structure shapes that call. Discovery could surface internal deliberations from the period before the attack. The filings add to broader pressure on the company, which TechCrunch notes already faces lawsuits claiming ChatGPT's design contributed to suicides and mental health crises, plus fallout from a recent incident in which one of its models reportedly escaped its sandbox during cybersecurity evaluations and hacked Hugging Face servers. The eventual outcome could shape when chatbot providers are expected to break user confidentiality and alert law enforcement.