Congressman Ro Khanna Wants FBI to do ‘Full and Transparent’ Investigation Into Death of OpenAI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif) has called for the FBI to do a “full and transparent” investigation into the death of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji. While the county medical examiner determined that 26-year-old Indian American died of suicide in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26, his parents believe their son was murdered. The Congressman’s social media request came a few weeks after Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy began questioning the circumstances under which their son died. 

Khanna’s post on X is comment on a post by Ramarao where she thanks the congressman forsaking about their son Balaji and “assuring to support us and calling for FBI investigation.” She has tagged Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chairs of Trumps Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, as well as Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI. 

Khanna told Mercury News that he had a “long call” with Ramarao, earlier in the day, which made him “believe her that there are unanswered questions.” But he told the publication that he “will leave the investigation to the appropriate federal law enforcement agencies,” when asked if he would take additional steps at the congressional level to investigate the death.

The family has hired an expert to perform an independent autopsy, but has yet to release the report’s findings, Balaji’s mother, Poornima Ramarao told The Mercury News. “We’re demanding a thorough investigation — that’s our call.”Meanwhile, officers have told The Mercury News so far they do not suspect any foul play in Balaji’s death.

Speaking to The Mercury News at their Alameda County home, Ramarao, herself a former employee of Microsoft who worked on its Azure cloud computing program, said it’s hard to believe that her only child could take his own life. She described him as “an amazing human being, from childhood.” The Florida-born, Bay Area-raised Balaji was “a prodigy from an early age,” his mother said, noting that he “spoke her name at 3 months old, and could recognize words at 20 months.” He “appeared to have a knack for technology, math and computing,” she said. He won several trophies and laurels, including in the 2016 United States of America Computing Olympiad.

Elon Musk weighed in on Balaji’s death as well. In a post on X, Musk, an early funder of OpenAI who later split with the company and feuded with its CEO Sam Altman doubted that Balaji took his own life. His comment was a reply to a post by Balaji’s mother that called for the FBI to investigate.

The young techie made headlines in late October when he accused OpenAI of breaking federal copyright law by siphoning data from across the internet to train its blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT. He posted a detailed analysis of his concerns on a personal website and claimed the company’s data collection practices are “not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”

His death came a week after he had been named in court filings as someone who had “unique and relevant documents” that would support the case against OpenAI, with whom he worked for nearly four years. The Mercury News and seven sister news outlets are among several newspapers, including The New York Times, to sue the San Francisco-based startup in the past year. Balaji helped gather and organize the enormous amounts of internet data used to train the startup’s ChatGPT chatbot.

In an interview with the New York Times published on Oct. 23, Balaji argued OpenAI was harming businesses and entrepreneurs whose data were used to train ChatGPT. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he told the outlet, adding that “this is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.”Balaji last spoke to his parents on Nov. 22, Ramarao said to Mercury News, and added that “the 10-minute phone call centered around his recent trip, and ended with him talking about getting dinner.” Her son was “very happy,” Ramarao said. “He had a blast,” she said, about his trip. “He had one of the best times of his life.”

However, when she called him the following day, he didn’t pick up her phone. Assuming he must be busy with friends, she hung up. But when she didn’t hear from him until Nov. 25, she visited his apartment, but got no answer. She told The Mercury News that when she called authorities that evening, she was “allegedly told by a police dispatch center that little could be done that day.” So she followed the next day — Nov. 26 — when the San Francisco police found Balaji’s body in his apartment. However, Ramarao wasn’t told of her son’s death “until a stretcher appeared in front of Balaji’s apartment,” she told The Mercury News. She was not allowed inside until the following day. “I can never forget that tragedy,” she said. “My heart broke.”