OpenAI sued over Canada school shooting

The family of a girl critically wounded in a Canada school shooting has filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, accusing the artificial intelligence firm of being aware of the suspect’s planned shooting but failing to alert authorities. 

The suit was filed Monday in the Supreme Court of British Columbia by the parents of 12-year-old Maya Gebala, who was one of the more than two dozen individuals injured in a shooting at the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School on Feb. 10. Eight people, including a teacher and five students, were killed. 

Gebala’s lawyers pointed to the two ChatGPT accounts allegedly used by 18-year-old suspect Jesse Van Rootselaar, who they say described various situations involving gun violence to ChatGPT over the course of several days. ChatGPT’s monitoring system flagged the posts, which were sent to employees for  review, per the suit. 

The suit stated about 12 OpenAI employees identified the posts as posing an “imminent risk of serious harm to others” and recommended law enforcement be contacted. When the recommendations were sent to leadership at OpenAI, the defendants allegedly “rebuffed their employees request,” to contact law enforcement and only banned the first account. 

The suspect allegedly opened a second ChatGPT account to continue planning gun violence scenarios, including a mass causality.

”OpenAI harvested such harmful information and data in an indiscriminate manner and then supplied such information and data to ChatGPT,” the suit stated. “OpenAI took no steps — adequate or at all — to avoid providing ChatGPT with such information and data, or impose any safeguards to prevent users from obtaining such information from ChatGPT.”

Gebala’s family said she was shot three times, leaving her with a traumatic brain injury, permanent cognitive and physical disability, and other mental and physical injuries. 

The suit went into further detail over ChatGPT’s development, including the GPT-4o model, which incorporated a memory tool to tailor responses over time to a user, and sycophancy, which the company admitted made responses overly supportive when reversing the change. 

Lawyers alleged OpenAI’s features were “intentionally designed to foster dependency” between the user and ChatGPT, which they said “assumed the role” of a mental health counselor or pseudo-therapist. 

Gebala’s family is seeking financial damages for OpenAI’s alleged negligence and failure to warn. 

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges for OpenAI, as courts weigh whether AI developers and their systems are responsible for certain mental health episodes.

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