OpenAI sued by families of school shooting victims in Canada's Tumbler Ridge

U.S. OpenAI sued by families of school shooting victims in Canada's Tumbler Ridge By Lauren Fichten Lauren Fichten Associate Producer Lauren Fichten is an associate producer at CBS News. Read Full Bio Lauren Fichten April 29, 2026 / 8:28 PM EDT / CBS News Add CBS News on Google Several families of victims of a mass shooting in Canada earlier this year are suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, alleging the company's generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, played a role in the February shooting and that the company should have taken steps to prevent it."The Tumbler Ridge attack was an entirely foreseeable result of deliberate design choices OpenAI made with full knowledge of where those choices led," the seven suits filed in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday claim.The lawsuits claim the shooter had extensive conversations spanning multiple days about scenarios involving gun violence. Few details about the chats have been made public so far. Police said the shooter, identified as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed five students and a teacher, as well as two family members at home, and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the rampage on Feb. 11.Police said the shooter had previously been held under British Columbia's Mental Health Act, which allows police to detain someone experiencing a mental health crisis that might need treatment. The complaints allege authorities had also temporarily removed firearms from the shooter's home.OpenAI has previously acknowledged that it banned Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT account last June — eight months before the shooting — for violating its usage policies. The company told CBS News the account was flagged by the company's automated abuse detection tools and human investigators.Last week, Altman issued an apology letter to the small community of Tumbler Ridge, in British Columbia, for not alerting law enforcement to the ChatGPT account of the shooter. "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement...