Lawyers representing survivors of the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., say they are filing 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI, alleging the tech company was negligent in not reporting the shooter’s chat history to police before the attack, which left nine people dead. Vancouver law firm Rice Parsons Leoni and Elliott LLP says the new lawsuits, filed in a U.S. federal court in California, accuse the company and its CEO Sam Altman of failing to apply safeguards that could have prevented the shooting. “OpenAI’s own safety team identified the shooter as a credible threat of imminent gun violence eight months before the attack, recommended that the company call the RCMP, and were overruled by OpenAI’s leadership,” the law firm said in a statement Wednesday. The plaintiffs in the new cases include teachers, students and a principal at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where most of the victims were found after one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canadian history. “These students and teachers were eyewitnesses to gun violence, murder and emergency lifesaving efforts rarely seen outside of a theatre of war, and only in the most lawless of places on earth,” said lawyer John Rice on behalf of the complainants. The new lawsuits are in addition to seven cases filed in April against the artificial intelligence company on behalf of the victims who died in the attack. Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, killed two family members at her home in the northern B.C. community on Feb. 10, then travelled to the school where six others were shot dead before she killed herself. Teacher ‘haunted’ by memories Statements from the plaintiffs provided by the law firm describe scenes of horror as surviving students armed themselves with knives and tools against the attacker, while others hid among the dead. “My students were in the library when the shooting happened. I did not know, nor could I know, that when I sent them to the library with my educational assistant, they were living their final moments,” said teacher Deidre Rushlow. “My colleagues and I are haunted by the memory of shielding children with our own bodies as our ears rang from the sound of continual gunshots and high-pitched screams,” she continued. “An entire generation of young lives, gone in a second; their innocence drowned in blood and the acrid haze of gunpowder.” The law firm, working with American co-counsel Edelson LC, says the new lawsuits are seeking compensatory and punitive damages from OpenAI and the “prevention of another AI-facilitated mass shooting.” The allegations have not been proven or tested in court. A spokesperson for OpenAI could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.
