The mother of Suchir Balaji, the 26-year-old OpenAI whistleblower who died under mysterious circumstances, has said that her son’s death was not a case of suicide and that the company had played a role in his untimely demise.
Balaji, a researcher at OpenAI, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, days after he accused the company of malpractice.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson that aired on Thursday, Balaji’s mother, Poornima Rao cast doubts over the current investigation into her son’s death and ruled out suicide saying, “He celebrated his birthday a day before he died. What more do we need to give on account that he was in a happy mood?” He also accepted a birthday gift from his father on the day of his death."
A University of California graduate, Balaji joined OpenAI in 2020 and was part of a project called WebGPT, which John Schulman, one of the OpenAI co-founders, said helped pave the way for ChatGPT.
The 26-year-old quit the company in 2024 following which he took an explosive story about OpenAI’s irregularities to The New York Times where he revealed that the AI giant had violated copyright law and products like ChatGPT were damaging the internet. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company," he told the American news outlet.
Rao said during the interview that she believes that her son was killed because he broke the story to the media. “My son had documents against OpenAI. They attacked him and...
[co-author: Katherine McGrath]* On July 2, 2025, the Departments of Justice and Health & Human Services announced a joint working group aimed at “strengthening their ongoing collaboration to a...