Independent Autopsy Finds OpenAI Whistleblower's Bullet Wound Was Not Consistent With Suicide
San Francisco's medical examiner ruled OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji's death last year a suicide — but the young man's family claims in a recent lawsuit that their own pathologist found differently.
As Decrypt and other outlets report, the 26-year-old whistleblower's parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, say the independent autopsy they commissioned suggests that the gunshot wound that killed their son was inconsistent with suicide — building on claims they've been making since November that their son was murdered rather than having taken his own life.
In a lawsuit filed against San Francisco and its police department, the grieving parents are now accusing authorities of covering up foul play and demanding they release all files about Balaji's death.
"The lawsuit demands that the city, police department, and medical examiner release public documents withheld under the Public Records Act," the family's attorney Joseph Goethals told Decrypt. If authorities fail to do so expediently, the lawyer said that he would seek a court order to force the issue.
Just a month prior to his body being found in his apartment, the New York Times published a bold claim from the former OpenAI employee: that the company was, in spite of its half-baked insistence to the contrary, using "enormous amounts" of copyrighted materials without permission to train its models. Balaji knew this because he'd help gather said data before ChatGPT was released in November 2022.
Since Balaji's death, the young tech genius' parents have fought for answers, and said they've been met with resistance from SFPD. Police told Ramarao that she couldn't see her son's body because the bullet that killed him had "destroyed" his face, she said — but when independent pathologist Joseph Cohen examined the body, he discovered that that claim appeared to be false.
During that second autopsy, Cohen deduced that the downward and slightly left-to-right trajectory of the single bullet that penetrated Balaji's brainstem would have been unusual for a suicide. He also found a contusion on the back of the young man's head, suggesting, per the suit, that he may have been struck before being shot.
Thus far, authorities in San Francisco have been tight-lipped about the case because it's still open. According to a source with direct knowledge who spoke to Fortune magazine, however, that silence may soon end when police and the city medical examiner's office release letters with "detailed facts" that provide more evidence that the young man killed himself.
Throughout this debacle, Balaji's family hasn't pointed fingers at OpenAI or anyone else. Instead, the grieving parents are insisting that authorities fully investigate the matter — and, hopefully, start to heal from this unimaginable tragedy.
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The Chatbot Disinfo Inflaming the LA Protests
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Mentioned in today's episode: AI Chatbots Are Making LA Protest Disinformation Worse by David Gilbert I Joined Every Class Action Lawsuit I Could Find, and So Can You by Andy Vasoyan Vibe Coding Is Coming for Engineering Jobs by Will Knight You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer. Write to us at uncannyvalley@ How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for 'uncanny valley.' We're on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Zoë Schiffer: This is Zoë. Before we start, I want to take a chance to remind you that we really want to hear from you. If you have a question about AI, politics or privacy that's been on your mind or a topic that you wish we talked about on the show, you can write to us at UncannyValley@ and if you listen to our episodes and enjoy them, please, please rate them on your podcast app of choice. It really honestly helps people find us. Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley . I'm WIRED's Director of Business and Industry, Zoë Schiffer. Today on the show we're diving into how AI chatbots are fueling disinformation about the ongoing protests in Los Angeles. In recent days, LA residents have taken to the streets to protest the Trump administration's immigration policies and the increasingly frequent ICE raids. Social media is filled with information and footage about the protests and as people try and fact check what's actually going on. AI chatbots like Grok and ChatGPT are delivering incorrect and at times inflammatory answers. 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There was a TikTok account that started uploading videos of an alleged National Guard soldier named Bob who'd been deployed to the LA protests, and you could see him saying false and inflammatory things like like the fact that the protesters are "chucking in balloons full of oil" and one of the videos had close to a million views. So I don't know, it feels like people have to become a little more adept at identifying this kind of fake footage, but it's hard in an environment that is inherently contextless like a post on X or a video on TikTok. Leah Feiger: Totally. And that TikTok live stream that you mentioned from Bob, that got debunked by BBC, they took it down. That's gone. But people in response are like, "Oh my gosh, this is the mainstream media. They're just shutting this down. Here's this information." So it's like when you find the thing, when you debunk the thing, it is still not enough. And I have to get back to the questions of media literacy, and that's perhaps why the AI chatbots getting it wrong are so upsetting to me, because people are actually, not everyone, but there is for sure some good faith folks going, "Is this real? Please, someone tell me if this is real." Zoë Schiffer: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, they want to know. I know. My poor mom, she showed me a video the other day of a bunch of identical baby sloths looking at the camera. She was like, "Aren't these so cute? I found this on Facebook." And I was like, "Mom, those are not real sloths. We need to move on." She was crushed. Leah Feiger: I think though that AI animal slop is something that I may be okay with. Zoë Schiffer: The one form of AI that Leah likes is the AI animals. Leah Feiger: Nope, nope, I take it back. I dig it back on the record. Anyway, lower stakes, but arguably still contributing to the fact that what's real? I don't know. Who's to say? 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He also stripped away some of the content moderation rules that the company had spent years weighing and putting in place and debating internally. And as we've had big news events play out in real time, the kind of thing that Twitter was made to do, big earthquake, war, protests, whatever it is, these moments where previously you would've seen everyone flock to X to figure out what was going on, you still see people doing that same behavior, but the ability to ascertain what is actually going on on that platform has declined so much in recent years. There is good information, but it's intermixed with all of this horrible, bad, false information, and it's really hard to tell what is what. Leah Feiger: It is such a mess, and I am not an X poster anymore, but I do go on frequently to see what's up. It's trash. It's a combination right now in this very specific moment because Elon Musk is back and posting nonstop about space travel, so it's like we have the Elon Musk posts that are at the very top of my feed. We have the LA is burning, the fire is spreading to the rest of America, and then we have a couple of journalists still hanging out being like, "Read my story." Zoë Schiffer: Getting no traction? Yeah. Leah Feiger: And it's so sad. Yeah. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, if you are someone who's trying to become an X-influencer, the kind of things that you need to share are inherently a little divisive, a little inflammatory, a little shocking. In some cases, they're getting paid by the platform to post this kind of content. I think that there are a few guardrails in place. 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They talk to people who are involved in getting people their money, and this statistic will haunt me forever, which is that something like only 4% of these class action lawsuit claims, what comes out, are actually ever claimed by people that deserve it. Devastating. Zoë Schiffer: I know. I'm part of this. I do get these letters kind of a lot. What did I just get recently? Leah Feiger: Zoë, you are part of the problem. Get that $7, Zoë. Zoë Schiffer: I know. Leah Feiger: They can Venmo now. Zoë Schiffer: I did it once and it was like $2, and I was like, okay. I think my expectation was that I was going to get like $3,000 and I was like, that's not what occurred. Leah Feiger: Okay. No, this is a long haul. This is a game. Okay, what's yours? What's your favorite thing? Zoë Schiffer: My recommendation is a story we published this week by Will Knight, our AI reporter. It is about how vibe coding is coming for engineering jobs, and it is so, so good. We've been talking to engineers all across Silicon Valley hearing about what they're calling the engineering apocalypse that is coming because AI coding agents are getting so, so good. But actually when Will did the reporting, it's a lot more complicated. People said it was like giving a toddler a chainsaw and that you could come up with really, really great things. Yes, you can code an entire app and website just by talking to a chatbot, but you can also create really buggy code, code that has all sorts of security vulnerabilities. And people were like, "It totally breaks down as soon as you care about the functionality of the app that you're building." Leah Feiger: I'm in a cold sweat right now. Zoë Schiffer: I know. I know. I was like, this is all of Leah's nightmares combined in one. Leah Feiger: My actual horror story. Zoë Schiffer: Leah, we should make you vibe code something for business. Leah Feiger: Oh my God. I would sit there and start crying. 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