The parents of deceased OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji have sued the city of San Francisco and the San Francisco Police Department, alleging that the real cause of his death was not suicide, but murder.
The lawsuit, filed in January, alleges that the SFPD covered up the crime, ruling it a suicide without conducting a thorough investigation.
Balaji, who had worked as a researcher at OpenAI, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment last November. Attorneys say Balaji’s parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, requested further investigation into his death but were told the case was already closed.
“The lawsuit demands that the city, police department, and medical examiner release public documents withheld under the Public Records Act,” Joseph Goethals, attorney for the petitioners, told Decrypt. He said that if the documents weren’t provided within 10 days, and “no valid exceptions apply, a lawsuit can compel their release. We will seek a court order to obtain them.”
The lawsuit claims that SFPD violated the California Public Records Act by unlawfully withholding public records of the case. Attorneys for Ramarao and Ramamurthy also argued that the investigation into their son’s death was rushed and inadequate, with officials ignoring key forensic findings and failing to address their requests for further inquiry.
The lawsuit demands the immediate disclosure of all reports, photos, and videos, along with coverage of legal costs.
Said Geothals: “If the San Francisco Superior Court does not interpret and impose the law correctly, we will seek recourse with the Court of Appeal. We hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Balaji worked for OpenAI from November 2020 to August 2024. In an interview with The New York Times in October, he said that before the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, he had helped OpenAI gather and use “enormous amounts” of data taken from the internet without permission.
According to the lawsuit, in December, Balaji’s family hired forensic pathologist Dr. Joseph Cohen to perform a private autopsy. In his report, Dr. Cohen determined that there was a single gunshot wound in the mid-forehead, slightly to the right of the bridge of his nose.
Dr. Cohen said that the bullet trajectory was unusual for a suicide, as it traveled downward at a slight left-to-right angle, completely missing the brain before lodging in the brainstem, according to the suit. Dr. Cohen identified a contusion on the back of Balaji’s head, which he said raised further questions about the circumstances of his death.
The San Francisco Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.
The lawsuit called out the circumstances of Bilaji’s death. His body was found a week after The New York Times mentioned the whistleblower in a court filing related to its lawsuit against OpenAI.
Despite Balaji’s revelations, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pushed back on the New York Times’ claims. Speaking at the newspaper’s annual DealBook Summit, Altman dismissed the allegations. He further claimed that the publication’s lawsuit against OpenAI over use of its materials to train AI models put the paper on the “wrong side of history.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
