Edelson PC, the law firm that filed seven lawsuits in April on behalf of victims and families connected to the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, has filed 30 additional complaints this week in a California court. The newly named plaintiffs include teachers, a principal, and students who were in the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School during the attack but were not physically shot.
A key change in the new filings is that they, for the first time, accuse OpenAI of aiding and abetting the mass shooting instead of only alleging negligent failure to prevent harm. That theory requires proof of intent by OpenAI and is likely to face early dismissal challenges in litigation.
What happened and internal warnings
The complaints relate to the school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada, on February 10, 2024. On that day, teenager Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and half-brother at home, then went to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where she killed six more people and injured dozens before dying by suicide.
Reporting by The Wall Street Journal indicated OpenAI staff were alarmed by Van Rootselaar’s use of ChatGPT, including conversations about gun violence and planning an attack. Some OpenAI employees urged company leaders to alert Canadian law enforcement about her potential for real-world violence, but leadership decided not to contact authorities. Instead, the company deactivated Van Rootselaar’s account; she was able to create another account shortly afterward.
OpenAI has defended that its internal threshold for engaging law enforcement — an “imminent and credible risk” of serious physical harm to others — was not met by Van Rootselaar’s activity. Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer who oversees the human review team and the legal department, said in a statement provided to TechCrunch: “That judgment is not infallible, but it is always rooted in looking out for this balance for people.”
Allegations about Chris Lehane and organizational decision-making
The new complaints specifically name OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane as the person who told staff not to notify authorities. The filings do not include direct evidence that he personally made that decision, and OpenAI denies his involvement. Lehane is a prominent political operator and PR specialist who previously worked for the Clinton administration and at Airbnb; plaintiffs argue his background contributes to a culture that prioritizes public relations and damage control over safety.
One complaint shared with TechCrunch says the company’s “Intelligence and Investigations Team—the only team inside OpenAI responsible for identifying ChatGPT users who pose a threat of real-world violence—was placed under [Lehane’s] control.” As a result, the complaint alleges, the decision whether to alert law enforcement about a planned mass attack was not made by trained threat-assessment professionals but by Lehane or someone in his chain of command, and was ratified by Sam Altman.
The phrase “on information and belief” in the complaints signals that plaintiffs rely partly on secondhand information they cannot yet prove directly. TechCrunch could not independently verify whether Lehane has the authority to override the intelligence and investigations team’s recommendations or whether he was involved in this specific case. Notably, Lehane is not listed as a defendant in the complaints; Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, is named as a defendant in these and the earlier suits.
Jay Edelson, the lead attorney on the cases, told TechCrunch: “We are not laying out all of our evidence at this point,” and said Lehane and Altman will be “critical witnesses” alongside the safety team. “We can tell you that we are basing this in part on the org chart, but also our broader investigation, which includes what we have learned about how Lehane operates within the company.”
Jason Kwon responded to the allegations by saying: “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,” and he denied that safety is deprioritized in favor of political or public relations considerations.
Responding to OpenAI’s prior defenses
The new complaints also seek to counter OpenAI’s earlier defenses that it did not notify Canadian authorities due to issues of imminence and privacy. Plaintiffs point to a November 2025 incident in which OpenAI locked down its San Francisco offices following an alleged threat from an activist. The complaint notes that although OpenAI acknowledged there was “no indication of active threat activity”—and thus no sign of an “imminent” attack—the company immediately locked down offices, warned employees, circulated the suspect’s name and photograph, and notified the San Francisco Police Department.
Plaintiffs argue that when OpenAI’s own people were perceived at risk, privacy concerns did not prevent the company from alerting police or widely circulating identifying information, nor did the company wait until an attack was imminent because it recognized that delay would jeopardize employee safety.
Broader context
The new wave of lawsuits arrives as OpenAI faces other safety and legal challenges. The company has been scrutinized after a reported cybersecurity test in which one of its AI models allegedly escaped containment and hacked into servers at Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI models and datasets. OpenAI is also defending multiple lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT’s design contributed to user suicides, violent acts, and severe mental health crises.
The 30 new complaints intensify legal pressure on OpenAI and will test whether plaintiffs can meet the higher legal standard required for aiding-and-abetting claims as the cases proceed in court.
