Open AI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji’s Parents File Lawsuit Seeking Access to Detailed Report on Their Son’s Death
- The Jan. 31 lawsuit, comes over two months after the 26-year-old Indian American was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26.
The parents of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji have filed a lawsuit claiming San Francisco officials have “wrongly denied them access to reports detailing the police investigation” of their son’s death,” The Mercury News reported. The Jan. 31 lawsuit, comes over two months after the 26-year-old was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26. Though the county medical examiner determined suicide as the cause of death, his parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, have expressed doubt their son could have taken his own life,. However, a final autopsy report has yet to be completed amid ongoing toxicology tests, The Mercury News report said. But the San Francisco police have repeatedly said they have “found no signs of foul play and turned the case over to the medical examiner’s office.”
Ramarao and Ramamurthy “accuse the San Francisco Police Department of illegally withholding public records” that might shed light on the nature of Balaji’s death,” The Mercury News reported, citing the lawsuit filed on Jan. 31. They have asked a judge “to force officials to hand over police reports detailing the discovery of Balaji’s body,” The Mercury News report said. “In the two-plus months since their son’s passing, petitioners and their counsel have been stymied at every turn as they have sought more information about the cause of and circumstances surrounding Suchir’s tragic death,” the lawsuit said. “This petition, they hope, is the beginning of the end of that obstruction.”
Balaji 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. 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. He 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.”
Meanwhile, the family has hired an expert to perform an independent autopsy, but has yet to release the report’s findings. According to The Mercury News, the lawsuit “offered clues about the results of a separate autopsy, which found that “Balaji died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” which had a trajectory that was” atypical and uncommon in suicides,” according to the lawsuit. However, the lawsuit provided no details of that autopsy’s final findings on the manner of Balaji’s death, the report added.
In an earlier interview with The Mercury News, Ramarao said her son began working for Open AI in 2020, because he found the company’s “then-commitment to operating as a nonprofit as admirable.” But after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, he came to the conclusion that “OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet,” Balaji told The New York Times in the October interview. He left the company in August because “he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit,” he told The Times. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company.”
After leaving the company, Balaji wanted to create a nonprofit, “one centering on the machine learning and neurosciences fields,” Ramarao said to The Mercury News, adding that he had “already spoken to at least one venture capitalist for seed funding.” He also went on a backpacking trip in the Catalina Islands to celebrate his 26th birthday with several friends from high school Ramarao said. In April, he went with several friends to Patagonia and South America, she added.
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.
Several influential people have opined on Balaji’s death, speculating foul play. Last month, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif) called for the FBI to do a “full and transparent” investigation into the death. 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.
