Big Tech whistleblower's parents sue, sounding alarm over son's unexpected death
The parents of a young California tech whistleblower whose 2024 death was ruled a suicide are now suing the City and County of San Francisco, alleging they violated public records laws by refusing to fulfill their requests for information about their son's death.
Suchir Balaji, 26, was an employee at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, at the time of his Nov. 26, 2024, death. A San Francisco County medical examiner concluded the next day he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside his apartment.
"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. This petition, they hope, is the beginning of the end of that obstruction," the lawsuit states.
San Francisco City Attorney's Office spokesperson Jen Kwart told Fox News Digital that once their office is served, they will review the complaint and respond accordingly.
"Mr. Balaji's death is a tragedy, and our hearts go out to his family," Kwart said.
"It's really been a nightmare for the last three months for them," one of the family's attorneys, Kevin Rooney, told Fox News Digital.
"We really feel that there's a lot of things that are known to us that are inconsistent with suicide and would suggest … that his death was the result of a homicide."
Just days before he died, Balaji was "upbeat and happy" during a trip to Catalina Island with his friends for his 26th birthday, the complaint filed Jan. 31 says.
The lawsuit describes Balaji as a "child prodigy with a particular interest in and talent for coding." He attended the University of California at Berkeley, and, upon graduating, was hired as an AI researcher at OpenAI.
"In that position, he was integral in OpenAI's efforts to gather and organize data from the internet used to train GPT-4, a language model used by the company's now-ubiquitous online chatbot, ChatGPT," the complaint says.
By August 2024, however, Balaji "had become disillusioned with OpenAI's business practices and decided to leave to pursue his own projects." In October, he was featured in a New York Times article titled "Former Open AI Researcher Says the Company Broke Copyright Law," with his photo.
Balaji alleged that "OpenAI violates United States copyright law because ChatGPT trains on copyrighted products of business competitors and then can imitate and substitute those products, running the risk of reducing the commercial viability of OpenAI's competitors to zero," according to the lawsuit.
In a Jan. 16 statement, OpenAI described Balaji as a "valued member" of the company's team, and its employees are "still heartbroken by his passing."
Balaji's parents, Poornima Ramarao and Bajami Ramamurthy, allege their requests for more information about their son's death were denied unfairly under the California Public Records Act. They further alleged in the lawsuit that investigators did not take their concerns about Balaji's whistleblower status seriously.
Rooney said there are good reasons for investigators not to disclose certain information about a criminal case to the public.
"But you should at least communicate with them and let them know generally what's being done to investigate the case," Rooney said. "And if that hasn't been done here because they've made a conclusion that Suchir died by suicide and that the investigation is closed, well … then we do have a right under the law [to view police records].
"When Ms. Ramarao informed the representative that her son had been a whistleblower against OpenAI and had been featured in the New York Times regarding his whistleblower allegations, the representative declined to follow up or seek any additional information," the lawsuit alleged.
"Instead, the [medical examiner's office] representative handed Ms. Ramarao Suchir's apartment keys and told her she could retrieve her son's body the following day. The representative also told Ms. Ramarao that she should not be allowed to see Suchir's body and that his face had been destroyed when a bullet went through his eye."
Dr. Joseph Cohen, a forensic pathologist hired by Balaji's parents, conducted a private autopsy and noted that Balaji's gunshot wound was "atypical and uncommon in suicides." The 26-year-old also had a contusion on the back of his head, according to the complaint.
Cohen also "noted that the trajectory of the bullet was downward with a slight left to right angle" and "that the bullet completely missed the brain before perforating and lodging in the brain stem."
Fox News Digital reached out to OpenAI for comment.
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