Mother of Deceased OpenAI Whistleblower Alleges Potential Murder Plot, Calls for FBI Investigation

The mother of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, is calling for an FBI investigation into his death. Poornima Ramarao took to X on Sunday to announce that Balaji’s family hired a private investigator, whose initial findings allegedly call into question a determination by the city’s chief medical examiner that Balaji died by suicide.

Balaji, who was just 26 years old, worked at OpenAI for four years, where he had a key part in collecting the data that would be used to train ChatGPT. He became disillusioned as OpenAI morphed from a non-profit research lab into a commercial business, however, and he resigned in August before going public in an interview with the New York Times alleging mass copyright infringement. The news outlet is currently in a heated legal battle with OpenAI alleging ChatGPT has been trained on its articles without permission.

“Suchir’s apartment was ransacked,” the post by Ramarao (who goes by the shorter “Rao” surname on X) reads. “Sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like some one hit him in bathroom based on blood spots.” The identity of the X account has not been verified, but it did share pictures of Balaji that do not appear to be posted elsewhere online. It also linked to a GoFundMe account intended to raise funds for further investigation, which has raised more than $47,000.

Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and is currently embroiled in his own lawsuit against the AI giant, replied to Ramarao’s post saying simply, “This doesn’t seem like a suicide.”

Gizmodo contacted Ramarao for comment but we have not heard back. OpenAI referred to a previous statement expressing condolences to the family.

Update on @suchirbalaji

We hired private investigator and did second autopsy to throw light on cause of death. Private autopsy doesn’t confirm cause of death stated by police.

Suchir’s apartment was ransacked , sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like some one hit him…

— Poornima Rao (@RaoPoornima) December 29, 2024

Balaji began working at OpenAI as an intern back in 2018 and joined the company full-time in 2021. Business Insider interviewed Ramarao following her son’s death, and wrote that Balaji was gifted from a young age and made significant contributions to ChatGPT’s training methods and infrastructure during his time there. In 2022 he had been tasked with scraping data from across the internet to use in training GPT-4, the model that would power ChatGPT’s launch at the end of that year.

Considering OpenAI jumpstarted Silicon Valley’s generative AI race, Balaji served as a high-profile whistleblower in the fight over whether AI companies have the right to openly use content from across the web in their products. It is a highly divisive topic, with media companies claiming outright theft while tech industry insiders chalk it up to fair use. At stake are potentially tens of billions of dollars and the future of what some believe is the next major platform shift in technology. Large language models powering models like ChatGPT require immense amounts of training data, primarily written texts, in order to write like a human and produce answers to any question thrown at them.

It is no surprise then that Balaji likely faced immense criticism and bullying online after going public with his concerns. Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley has seen how the pressure to succeed can cause major stress and other mental health issues. That is not even including other risk factors like legal issues from making a whistleblower complaint; losing a job and harming future career prospects; or social isolation from peers in the industry.

Is it possible that Balaji was targeted over his actions? Possibly, but conspiracies are hard to keep secret, and the dull answer is often the correct one. It is not that difficult to see how everything Balaji was going through could lead to hopelessness. His would not be the first case of a whistleblower in tech ending their own life over their moral beliefs either—the lead scientist of Theranos, Ian Gibbons, reportedly took his own life following facing immense pressure from founder and now-convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes for raising concerns about the validity of the company’s blood tests.

It is not surprising that Balaji’s parents would go to the lengths they have either, hoping to find answers and in disbelief that they lost their son. Maybe they will find that something more nefarious occurred. But there is no strong reason to believe that is the case at this point. Hopefully, they are able to find the closure they are looking for.