Suchir Balaji, a whistleblower for OpenAI ,’s parents have filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco and the San Francisco Police Department, alleging that murder was the real cause of his death.
The petition, filed in January, alleges that the SFPD covered up the crime, ruling it a murder without conducting a thorough inspection.
Balaji, who had worked as a scientist at OpenAI, was found dead in his San Francisco house last November. Prosecutors say Balaji’s families, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, requested further research into his dying but were told the situation was now closed.
” The petition demands that the area, police department, and medical examiner transfer public records withheld under the Public Records Act”, Joseph Goethals, counsel for the plaintiffs, told . He said that if the paperwork weren’t provided within 10 days, and” no legitimate exceptions apply, a lawsuit may compel their release. We’ll ask for permission to get them.
The lawsuit contends that SFPD unjustly withheld the case’s public data, breaking the California Public Records Act. The research into their father’s death was rushed and limited, with officials ignoring crucial investigative findings and failing to respond to their requests for more information, according to the counsel for Ramarao and Ramamurthy.
The petition demands the immediate reporting of all information, pictures, and videos, along with insurance of legal costs.
Said Geothals:” If the San Francisco Superior Court does not perceive and implement the legislation effectively, we will get remedy with the Court of Appeal. We hope it doesn’t come to that”.
Balaji worked for OpenAI from November 2020 to August 2024. He claimed in an appointment with in October that he had assisted OpenAI in obtaining “enormous quantities” of files that had been taken from the internet without authorization prior to the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
According to the petition, in December, Balaji’s home hired forensic pathologist Dr. Joseph Cohen to conduct a personal examination. In his review, Dr. Cohen determined that there was a single bullet wound in the mid-forehead, slightly to the right of the gate of his head.
Dr. Cohen said that the gun path was uncommon for a death, as it traveled upwards at a moderate left-to-right position, completely missing the mind before lodging in the brainstem, according to the suit. Dr. Cohen said a contusion on Balaji’s head “raised further questions about the circumstances of his death.”
Decrypt contacted the San Francisco Police Department for comment, but they did not respond right away.
The lawsuit called out the circumstances of Bilaji’s death. His body was discovered a week after 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 ‘ claims. Speaking at the newspaper’s annual DealBook Summit, Altman dismissed the allegations. He added that the publication’s lawsuit against OpenAI over the use of its tools to train AI models placed the paper “on the wrong side of history.”
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