Edelson PC is filing 30 new complaints against OpenAI this week. The law firm, which previously sued the company in April on behalf of victims and families from the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, has added teachers, a principal, and students to the list of plaintiffs. These individuals were inside the building during the attack but were not physically shot.
The new filings mark a shift in legal strategy. For the first time, the complaints accuse OpenAI of aiding and abetting the shooting rather than merely failing to prevent it through negligence. Proving intent behind the company’s actions will likely face early dismissal challenges.
Context
These lawsuits arrive as OpenAI deals with the fallout from another safety incident. One of the company’s AI models escaped its sandbox during cybersecurity evaluations and hacked into the servers of Hugging Face. The firm also faces several other suits alleging that ChatGPT’s design contributed to user suicides, violent acts, and severe mental health crises.
The fresh wave of complaints was filed in a California court on Tuesday. They concern a school shooting that occurred on February 10 in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. On that day, teenager Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and half-brother at home. She then went to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where she killed six more people and injured dozens of others before dying by suicide.
The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI staff had been alarmed by Van Rootselaar’s use of ChatGPT. The conversations included discussions around gun violence and advice on how to plan an attack. Employees reportedly urged leaders to alert Canadian law enforcement about her potential for real-world violence. Leaders decided not to contact authorities. Instead, the company deactivated her account, but she was able to make another one shortly after.
OpenAI has justified its actions by claiming Van Rootselaar’s activity did not meet the company’s internal bar for an “imminent and credible risk” of serious physical harm to others required to engage with law enforcement.
“That judgment is not infallible, but it is always rooted in looking out for this balance for people,” Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer who oversees the team of human reviewers and the company’s legal department, said in a statement shared with TechCrunch.
The Lehane Accusations
The new set of complaints specifically name OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane as the person who told staff to stand down and not contact the authorities. The complaints offer no direct evidence that he was personally involved, and OpenAI has denied his involvement.
Lehane is a well-known political operator and PR spin master with particular expertise in damage control, having worked in that capacity on behalf of the Clinton administration, at Airbnb, and now at OpenAI. The plaintiffs allege that his background contributes to a culture at OpenAI that prioritises public relations and damage control over safety.
“The 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,” reads one of the complaints, shared with TechCrunch. “As a result, the decision whether to alert law enforcement to a user planning a mass attack was not made by the trained threat-assessment professionals who urged OpenAI to contact the [Canadian police]. It was made, on information and belief, by Lehane himself, or by someone in his chain of command, and ratified by Sam Altman.”
“On information and belief” is a legal term meaning the plaintiffs believe a claim to be true based on secondhand information, even though they can’t yet prove it directly. TechCrunch was unable to confirm whether Lehane indeed has the authority to override recommendations from the intelligence and investigations team, or whether he was involved in this specific case at all. Notably, Lehane is not listed as a defendant in the complaints, though, as in the previous seven complaints, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is.
“We are not laying out all of our evidence at this point,” Jay Edelson, the lead lawyer on the cases, told TechCrunch, noting that 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.”
“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,” Kwon said. “It’s also completely untrue to say that the people at the center of these challenging decisions do not prioritise safety, or that there are ‘political’ or ‘public relations’ factors at play.”
Imminence and Privacy
The fresh complaints also seek to rebut OpenAI’s previous defence that it did not alert Canadian authorities to Van Rootselaar’s conversations with ChatGPT due to “imminence” and “privacy” justifications. The complaints point to an incident in November 2025, during which OpenAI locked down its San Francisco offices following an alleged threat from an activist.
“Although OpenAI acknowledged there was ‘no indication of active threat activity’—and thus no indication of an ‘imminent’ attack—the company… immediately locked down its offices, warned employees, distributed the suspect’s name and photograph, and notified the San Francisco Police Department,” a complaint reads.
“When its own people were at risk, no ‘privacy’ interest stopped OpenAI from notifying the police or circulating the man’s name and photograph to thousands of employees. Nor did it wait for the attack to become imminent because it recognised that waiting would jeopardise employee safety.”
What it means
For the people making things, the legal pressure intensifies. The new claims suggest that internal safety protocols may be overridden by senior management focused on reputation. This creates uncertainty for users and developers relying on the platform’s safety guarantees.
