It’s a busy time to be a lawyer for an AI company. British Columbia became the latest government to sue OpenAI last week, alleging the company failed to warn police before February’s mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.
The case is about the loss of life at the school, but at its core is an argument plaintiffs are making increasingly often in lawsuits against AI companies. The tools they produce aren’t just services that somebody happened to use. Those bringing cases against AI companies argue that they’re products—and potentially defective ones at that.
The province alleges OpenAI failed to alert law enforcement after the shooter’s conversations with ChatGPT triggered internal concerns. The attack killed eight people and wounded 27 others. For its part, OpenAI has said it has measures designed to prevent harm and cooperates with law enforcement when it identifies credible threats.
British Columbia isn’t the only example of individuals or groups bringing the fight to AI firms. Matthew and Maria Raine sued OpenAI last year after their 16-year-old son Adam died by suicide, alleging ChatGPT validated suicidal thoughts and supplied information about methods of self-harm. OpenAI disputes responsibility for the incident, though it has acknowledged that its safeguards can become less reliable over long conversations.
The Raines have made an argument similar to that of Megan Garcia, who sued Character.AI and Google after her 14-year-old son Sewell Setzer III died by suicide in 2024. A federal judge allowed significant parts of Garcia’s case to proceed, including product liability claims aimed at the design of Character.AI rather than simply the content it generated. Character.AI and Google agreed to settle Garcia’s case and some related lawsuits in January, though the terms were not disclosed.
One reason we’re seeing so many cases arrive in courtrooms is simply the widespread use of AI. “It’s not just a small segment of early adopters who are using it, but now it’s reached into the mainstream,” says Eric Goldman, associate dean for research and professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law. As the tech gets into more hands, there are more opportunities for things to go wrong—including among later adopters who may be less informed about the technology’s strengths and limitations.
That doesn’t fully explain the volume of cases wending their way through court, though. Plaintiffs’ lawyers are increasingly framing chatbots as products whose features can be negligently designed. In the Garcia case, Judge Anne Conway said Character.AI could be treated as a product because Garcia’s claims concerned defects in the app’s design rather than its output. The ruling didn’t find that Character.AI caused Setzer’s death—something the firm is at pains to point out. But it does show a legal system willing to debate these cases on the basis of defective products rather than other theories of liability.
Eran Kahana, an AI and cybersecurity lawyer and fellow at Stanford Law School, reckons the focus on design is only going to increase. “What we have here is fundamentally and irretrievably a chatbot design problem,” he says. Features such as memory, emotional mirroring, and sycophancy are core to the current crop of chatbots because they make the systems feel more human. But they can also potentially put vulnerable users at risk, Kahana argues.
Such arguments aren’t limited to cases where lives have been lost. Nippon Life Insurance Company of America sued OpenAI in Illinois in March, alleging ChatGPT effectively practised law without a licence after a woman used it while trying to reopen a settled disability case. The complaint says ChatGPT helped her with legal arguments and court filings. OpenAI has moved to dismiss the case, but Kahana sees that, too, as an example of a system whose design can allow it to cross a line its developer arguably should have anticipated.
It’s tempting to point the finger of blame solely at the tech, but Goldman notes that these issues exist within a broader range of social problems. “So many of the concerns about generative AI relate to things like mental health issues, and mental health issues are not a generative AI problem,” he says.
Courts still haven’t settled questions that could dictate the future success or failure of many more cases, including whether a chatbot is a product and how much responsibility its maker bears if people act on its advice. Kahana argues existing product liability law may give us answers, but Goldman sees another possibility in past precedent: Lawmakers could eventually give generative AI companies some statutory protection from liability, echoing the protections internet companies received in the 1990s under Section 230.
That’d prove pretty controversial, but might be preferable to precedents set in individual court cases. Goldman cautions against expecting litigation to solve every problem exposed by AI. “We can fix generative AI,” he says, “and might not fix any problem.”
