OpenAI accused of ‘aiding and abetting’ Tumbler Ridge mass shooting in dozens of new lawsuits

Students, teachers, and the principal who were in Tumbler Ridge Secondary School during the February 10 attack filed 30 new lawsuits in California federal court. The Verge, following TechCrunch, reports they accuse OpenAI and Sam Altman of providing 'substantial assistance and encouragement' to alleged shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar.

The earlier family suits, filed in April, sounded in negligence: OpenAI's automated review flagged ChatGPT conversations about gun violence, the safety team recommended contacting Canadian authorities, and leadership did not. These new complaints add aiding and abetting. That theory needs more than a missed call. It needs a story about help.

The alleged help is concrete. Plaintiffs say OpenAI deactivated the account instead of issuing a system-wide ban, which let the suspect sign up again with another email. 'Providing the Shooter with continued access to this tool constituted substantial assistance in itself,' one filing says.

Jason Kwon, OpenAI's chief strategy officer, called the safety-team claims false and said it is 'completely untrue' that political or PR factors drove the decision. OpenAI's public line has been that the activity did not meet an internal bar of 'imminent and credible risk' of serious physical harm. That is a policy. It is also the entire case.

The complaints name chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane as the person who told staff to stand down. TechCrunch notes the filings offer no direct evidence he was personally involved, Lehane is not a defendant, and Kwon says investigators do not report to him. Plaintiffs' lawyer Jay Edelson says they are working from the org chart and a broader investigation and that Lehane and Altman will be 'critical witnesses.' 'On information and belief' is doing a lot of work. It will have to survive a motion to dismiss.

The most cutting comparison in the papers is November 2025, when OpenAI locked its San Francisco offices over an alleged activist threat, named the person internally, and called SFPD despite saying there was 'no indication of active threat activity.' The plaintiffs' point writes itself: imminence and privacy were flexible when the target was the company's own building.

Florida has its own aiding-and-abetting suit covering the FSU attack. Together these cases are trying to move ChatGPT from a product that sometimes fails to warn, to a product that kept a banned user in the loop. Signal Desk's read: the deactivation-not-ban fact, if it holds, is more dangerous to OpenAI than the Lehane subplot. A jury can understand a revolving door. A jury will punish a PR org-chart theory that the company can knock out early.

On February 10, Van Rootselaar killed her mother and half-brother at home, then killed six people and injured dozens at the school before dying by suicide, according to TechCrunch. The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that staff were alarmed by the ChatGPT logs and urged a tip to Canadian police. OpenAI is separately facing suits over suicides and other real-world harm, and a Florida state case on mass shooters.