OpenAI Sued in 30 New Lawsuits Over Canadian School Shooting, Total Claims Now Hit 37

Thirty new lawsuits landed against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman this week over the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia. Combined with seven earlier suits filed in April, the legal tally against the ChatGPT maker now stands at 37 cases, according to Global News.

The plaintiffs firm, Edelson PC, filed the new complaints in a California federal court this week on behalf of teachers, a principal, and students who were inside the building during the attack. Lead attorney Jay Edelson said the filings show "the larger impact and how many people's lives were really destroyed all based on decisions made by people at OpenAI," according to NPR.

What happened at the school

On February 10, 2026, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and 11-year-old half-brother at home, then drove to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and killed five students and a teacher before killing herself, according to NPR and Global News. Roughly two dozen others were hurt. Court filings described in Global News detail students hiding under desks and in a storage closet while a teacher tried to keep a wounded classmate alive.

The core allegation

Eight months before the shooting, in June 2025, OpenAI's automated systems flagged Van Rootselaar's account for "gun violence activity and planning," according to an April lawsuit cited by NPR. OpenAI deactivated that account. Van Rootselaar created a second one and kept talking to ChatGPT. OpenAI says it did not know about the second account until after the shooting.

The Wall Street Journal reported, as cited by TechCrunch, that OpenAI staff were alarmed by Van Rootselaar's conversations and pushed leadership to alert Canadian authorities. Leadership decided not to. OpenAI's position, laid out by chief strategy officer Jason Kwon, is that the activity never crossed the company's internal bar for an "imminent and credible risk" of serious physical harm, the threshold required to contact law enforcement.

The new twist: naming Lehane

What's new in this batch of lawsuits is a direct allegation that Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer and a veteran political operative who previously worked for the Clinton administration and Airbnb, personally overrode the safety team's call to refer the account to police. Crypto Briefing frames this as an attempt by Edelson PC to "pierce the corporate veil" and hold individual executives, not just the company, liable.

OpenAI rejects that claim outright. "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," Kwon said in a statement provided to NPR. He also denied that political or public-relations considerations played any role in the safety team's decision-making.

That is a direct factual dispute between two named parties, and nothing in the public record so far resolves it. The lawsuits are allegations, not findings. No court has ruled on any of these claims, and no criminal charges have been filed against any OpenAI executive.

A legally aggressive new theory

The 30 new filings also escalate the legal theory itself. The original April lawsuits alleged negligence, product liability, and wrongful death. The new ones add a claim that OpenAI "aided and abetted" the shooting, according to TechCrunch.

Aiding-and-abetting requires proving OpenAI acted with intent to help facilitate the attack, not just that it failed to prevent one. TechCrunch's own reporting notes the claim "is likely to face early dismissal challenges" and that the complaints "offer no direct evidence" Lehane was personally involved in the decision, even as they name him as a defendant.

Plaintiffs are seeking more than $1 billion in combined damages and have requested jury trials across the filings, according to Crypto Briefing, putting the question of OpenAI's culpability in front of ordinary citizens rather than judges applying narrower legal standards.

Whether Van Rootselaar's June 2025 flag actually met a threshold requiring a police referral is a judgment call OpenAI made and stands behind. Whether that judgment was reasonable, or whether internal politics shaped it, is exactly what these 37 lawsuits will try to establish through discovery, depositions, and internal records, not press statements from either side.

OpenAI has separately faced a string of lawsuits alleging ChatGPT's design contributed to user suicides and violent acts, and the company disclosed a separate incident in which one of its models breached its own testing sandbox and accessed Hugging Face's servers. Neither of those matters is legally tied to the Tumbler Ridge case, but both relate to the broader question courts and regulators are now weighing: how much responsibility an AI company bears when it has advance warning and chooses not to act on it.

The cases are pending in California federal court. No trial date has been set.