Parents of Dead OpenAI Whistleblower Say They Believe He Was Murdered

"It’s brutal murder. Cold-blooded murder."

Alarming Allegations

In the wake of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji's shocking death, the young man's family say they believe he was murdered — but there's a lot more to this story, and that claim, than meets the eye.

As the San Francisco Standard reports, Balaji's mother Poornima Ramarao is not only claiming that her 26-year-old son was killed — as opposed to dying by suicide, which the city's medical examiner ruled as his cause of death — but also that media and local government were orchestrating a coverup.

Ramarao insisted to The Standard that Balaji "was very proud" that he'd come forward with allegations that OpenAI, his employer of four years, was committing copyright infringement. In October, the New York Times published those claims — and a month later, the young whistleblower was found dead of an apparent gunshot wound to the head.

"He was very proud of what he was doing — where is the depression?" the grieving mother said. "How do you think it’s suicide? It’s brutal murder. Cold-blooded murder."

Pointing Fingers

After her son's death was ruled a suicide, Ramarao and her husband, Balaji Ramamurthy, began questing for answers. They hired a forensic pathologist to do a second autopsy which she says demonstrates that Balaji was shot in the back of the head.

Despite using that independent autopsy to corroborate her claims, though, Ramarao has also accused the secondary pathologist of being "hand-in-glove involved" with the medical examiner who had done the first. The family also hired and fired a lawyer who was, as Ramarao charged, "changing the narrative," and accused a reporter with The Standard of being "paid PR" for OpenAI.

According to Girish Bangalore, a realtor who said he went to college in India with Ramarao and who has created an online petition demanding a "comprehensive investigation" into Balaji's death, grief and cultural differences may be fueling the family's claims.

"On one side is the trauma of losing their only child," he told The Standard. "On the other side is, they’re immigrants from a foreign country that don’t really know what to do or how things work here."

Losing a child does indeed seem enough to drive parents to extremes — and the publicity surrounding Balaji's death certainly can't be helping.

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