OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji died by suicide, San Francisco Police have confirmed citing an autopsy report. Following weeks of investigation and repeated inquiries, officials have confirmed their initial findings, concluding that there is no evidence of homicide, as per a Fortune report.

When the 26-year-old Indian-American was found dead under suspicious circumstances last month, it caused a stir among the public, with Mr Balaji’s parents frequently alleging he was murdered.

In a 13-page report from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) and a four-page joint response to the lawsuit, the San Francisco Police and medical examiners announced on Friday that the investigation into Balaji’s death was officially closed.

They confirmed their initial conclusion that he died by suicide.

“The OCME found no evidence or information to establish a cause and manner of death for Mr Balaji other than a suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head,” read the medical examiner’s report. “SFPD conducted an independent investigation and based on the information SFPD reviewed, there is insufficient evidence to find Mr. Balaji’s death was the result of a homicide.”

However, Mr Balaji’s parents accused the police of lapses in the autopsy and pointed to their failure to acquire CCTV footage from the building where he lived. They added there was no suicide note.

Poornima Rao, Suchir Balaji’s mother, said that SFPD wrote inaccurate information in Autopsy and Police reports. “They have never retrieved CCTV footage from leasing office. We need report from police. We are only requesting transparent investigation,” she wrote on X.

SFPD writes inaccurate information in
Autopsy and Police report . They have never retrieved CCTV footage from leasing office . We need report from police.
We are only requesting transparent investigation.@elonmusk @kash_patel @MarioNawfal

— Poornima Rao (@RaoPoornima) February 15, 2025

Suchir Balaji was found dead in his apartment on November 26. After working for four years at OpenAI, he left the company when he found that the company was training its chatbot on copyrighted material stolen from the internet.

Balaji died a day after being listed in a court filing as someone whose files OpenAI planned to check as part of a lawsuit filed by individuals who were questioning the company’s procedures. Several well-known writers have filed the complaint, including best-selling author John Grisham.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Friday reacted to whistleblower Suchir Balaji’s death, saying that he was a “valued member” of their team. The Sam Altman-led company’s statement comes days after the mother of Mr Balaji – who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment in November – criticised and blamed OpenAI for her son’s death.

“Suchir was a valued member of our team and we are still heartbroken by his passing. We continue to feel his loss deeply.  We have reached out to the San Francisco Police Department and have offered our assistance if it’s needed. Law enforcement are the right authorities in this situation, and we trust them to continue sharing updates as needed,” OpenAI said in a statement.

It added that “out of respect”, they will not comment further on the issue.

pic.twitter.com/LBThrROv3W

— OpenAI Newsroom (@OpenAINewsroom) January 16, 2025

Mr Balaji, who died in November, had turned a whistleblower against OpenAI. He had publicly raised ethical concerns about the AI giant’s practices. 

An initial investigation concluded that Mr Balaji’s death was an act of suicide. However, since then, his family has called for an FBI investigation. They also highlighted several lapses and alleging that Mr Balaji was murdered. Following this, the San Francisco Police Department reopened the case as an “active investigation”, but did not share any further details.

Also Read | What OpenAI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji Revealed About The Dark Side Of AI Before Death

Suchir Balaji’s mother’s claims 

Earlier this week, Mr Balaji’s mother Poornima Rao alleged that OpenAI killed her son to “hide something they want nobody to know”. According to her, Mr Balaji had documents against the ChatGPT maker and knew what they were up to.

In an interview with American commentator Tucker Carlson, Ms Rao said, “My son had documents against OpenAI. They attacked him and killed him. Some documents were even missing after his death…My son celebrated his birthday a day before he died. What more do we need to give on account that he was in a happy mood?”

She also accused OpenAI of hushing up the investigation and any possible witnesses.

“Everybody is suppressed, nobody is ready to come up and tell the truth. Even the attorneys have been made to say that it is a suicide,” she said.

In another interview with an influencer on X, Ms Rao accused OpenAI of failing to recognise her son’s contributions to their flagship product, ChatGPT. But what bothered him was that there was no recognition for his work until he passed away. Even now, there’s no acknowledgment from OpenAI of his contributions. That’s very unfortunate,” she told X user Mario Nawfal.

Mr Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before he resigned in 2023. In his resignation, Mr Balaji had expressed dissatisfaction with the company’s shift to a for-profit model.

New Delhi:

The parents of Suchir Balaji, a former employee ChatGPT maker OpenAI, have alleged that his autopsy had shown signs of struggle such as a head injury. Twenty-six-year-old Balaji, who had flagged ethical concerns about OpenAI’s functioning after he left the Artificial Intelligence giant, was found dead at his San Francisco flat earlier this month. Authorities have said he had died by suicide.

Balaji’s parents Balaji Ramamurthy and Purnima Rao spoke to NDTV about their son’s tragic death and their fight for justice.

“We read the second autopsy, there are signs of struggle such as head injury, more details from the autopsy reveal it is murder,” his mother said.

Recounting his last conversation with his son, Mr Ramamurthy said, “He was returning from a birthday trip from Los Angeles where he went with his friends, he was happy. He told me he wanted to go to Las Vegas for CES (a tech show) in January. At the end, he said he was going for dinner,” he said.

Born and raised in California, Suchir Balaji worked with OpenAI for nearly four years as a researcher. He quit in August, protesting against the AI giant’s business practices. Suchir alleged that OpenAI had violated US copyright law and voiced his concern in a report in The New York Times, titled ‘Former OpenAI Researcher Says the Company Broke Copyright Law’.

Ms Rao said Suchir was among the top 10 in the artificial intelligence industry. “Why would he quit OpenAI and leave the AI industry, he was planning to start something in neuroscience and machine learning. Our suspicion is was he threatened by OpenAI, did they suppress him? he didn’t pick up another job, maybe they threatened him,” she said.

Suchir, his mother said, had consulted a copyright attorney and figured out he was not doing anything wrong and they were just suppressing him. That’s what made him go for The New York Times interview,” she said.

She said Suchir had told her he was working on some research and would publish it when ready. “In his publication, he explains with mathematical basis that the modulated answer is not exactly as per the information fed to ChatGPT.”

Ms Rao said Suchir had told her that the “work of artistes and journalists are stolen (by ChatGPT) and that’s very unethical”. “I concurred with him. He was not fighting against OpenAI, he was standing for humanity, he says in his article that he thought AI would be good for humanity but it is more harm.” 

Suchir’s mother said she had advised him to build up support for his cause and he was working on that. The 26-year-old’s parents say they believe the information Suchir had might have led to a turning point for the AI industry. “We believe so, we know now it is a powerplay, we have the autopsy report and he didn’t take his life. Who and why is something we need to explore,” Ms Ramarao said.

Earlier, X boss Elon Musk and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk voiced support for Suchir Balaji’s parents. In an X post in which Ms Rao said her son’s murder was being passed off as suicide, Musk replied, “This doesn’t seem like suicide.” Ms Ramarao said it was a great support for them, but clarified that they had not reached out to him yet.

Demanding an FBI investigation into her son’s death, Suchir’s mother said, “They must get to the bottom of this and give justice to my son, a precious life has been lost, it’s a loss to tech industry, he was incredibly smart. At OpenAI, his former boss says he tweaked the algorithm and found an easy way of doing things and that made a big impact on ChatGPT. OpenAI keeps saying we are supporting the parents, we wonder how.”

Suchir’s parents said they had also reached out to the Indian authorities in the US and had been assured support. “We expect the Indian government to support us and raise his voice for us.”

San Francisco, US:

Suchir Balaji, the 26-year-old OpenAI researcher-turned-whistleblower, was found dead in an apartment in San Francisco, US last month. His death on November 26 was determined suicide by the San Francisco medical examiner’s office as police found no evidence of wrong doing.

Balaji, who left OpenAI in August, has spoken out against the artificial intelligence company’s practice of training the chatbot on copyrighted material scraped from the internet very openly in recent months. The artificial intelligence (AI) giant has been fighting several lawsuits relating to its data-gathering practices.

About Suchir Balaji

Indian American Suchir Balaji grew up in Cupertino, California. A remarkably sharp kid, he excelled in programming contests, placing 31st in the ACM ICPC 2018 World Finals and winning first place in the 2017 Pacific Northwest Regional and Berkeley Programming Contests.

Balaji also secured 7th place in Kaggle’s TSA-sponsored “Passenger Screening Algorithm Challenge,” earning a $100,000 prize. Per his LinkedIn profile, he was the US Open 2016 National Champion and a USACO Finalist.

Like most others in his field, Balaji had been captivated by the promise of artificial intelligence since an early age. In an interview given to the New York Times in October, he mentioned his interest in AI started after he stumbled across a news story about the technology in his teens and imagined that neural networks could solve humanity’s greatest problems.

“I thought that AI was a thing that could be used to solve unsolvable problems, like curing diseases and stopping ageing…I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them,” he said, according to the NYT report.

Even before graduating, he worked at Scale AI, Helia, and was a Software Engineer at Quora. In 2020, Balaji joined a stream of Berkeley grads who went to work for OpenAI.

Suchir Balaji’s Time At OpenAI

He worked at OpenAI for four years, during which for one and half years, he helped gather and organize the enormous amounts of internet data the company used to build its online chatbot, ChatGPT.

Balaji told NYT that during his initial data at OpenAI, he did not carefully consider whether the company had a legal right to build its products using both copyrighted and open internet data. It was only after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 that he started to contemplate the issue and realised that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet by using copyrighted data, violating the law in the process.

By 2024, Balaji said realised “he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.” He left the company in August this year without any new job and started working on what he called “personal projects.”

He died a day after he was named in a court filing as someone whose files OpenAI would search as part of a lawsuit brought by those who sued the AI giant.

Suchir Balaji’s Allegation Against OpenAI

After leaving OpenAI, Suchir Balaji spoke out publicly against the way AI companies are using copyrighted data to create their technologies. He alleged that the AI models were too dependent on the labour of others as they are trained on copyrighted material scraped from the internet without authorisation.

“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,” he told the NYT.

He also explained his concerns on his personal website, where he noted that while generative models rarely produce outputs identical to their training data, the act of replicating copyrighted material during training could violate laws if not protected under “fair use.”

“Because fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis, no broad statement can be made about when generative AI qualifies for fair use,” he noted.

Balaji argued in several cases the chatbots directly compete with the copyrighted works they learned from. “Generative models are designed to imitate online data, so they can substitute for “basically anything” on the internet, from news stories to online forums,” he said.

According to him, the biggest problem is that with AI technologies gradually replacing existing internet services, they sometimes produce “false and sometimes completely made-up information – what researchers call “hallucinations.””

The internet, he said, is changing for the worse.

Allegations Against AI Companies

Balaji was not alone in his concerns about AI companies misusing copyrighter data to train their chatbots. Several US and Canadian news publishers, including the New York Times, have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and its primary partner, Microsoft, claiming they used millions of their articles to build chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

Many best-selling writers, including John Grisham, also have filed lawsuits against the company.

OpenAI Disputes Claims

OpenAI has disputed Balaji’s claims, insisting that their data use adhered to fair use principles and legal precedents.

“We build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by longstanding and widely accepted legal precedents. We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness,” OpenAI said in a statement.

The company told BBC in November that its software is “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation”.

Reacting to BAlaji’s death, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time.”