'My son had documents against OpenAI, they killed him': Whistleblower Suchir Balaji's mother claims

In an explosive interview with American commentator Tucker Carlson, she said her son possessed documents against them and what they were up to.

Rao made some stunning claims and serious charges over her son's death and the secrecy in the world of Artificial Intelligence.

Suchir Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment in November, shortly after he had turned a whistleblower against AI giant OpenAI.

The Indian-origin former employee previously made headlines after he accused OpenAI of violating US copyright law.

After an initial investigation, authorities said that his death was an act of suicide.

However, his family has since then called for an FBI investigation, highlighting several lapses and alleging that Balaji was murdered.

In the interview, Rao recalled that the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had declared that her son died by suicide.

However, when they asked her if she felt he could have killed himself and if he was depressed recently, she told them" "My son celebrated his birthday a day before he died. What more do we need to give on account that he was in a happy mood?"

She added that he had even received his birthday gift from his father the same day he was later found dead.

"My son had documents against OpenAI. They attacked him and killed him," she said adding that "some documents were missing" after his death.

She accused the ChatGPT maker of hushing up the investigation and any possible witnesses.

"Everybody is suppressed, nobody is ready to come up and tell the truth. Even the attorneys have been made to say that it is a suicide."

Elon Musk has shared Suchir Balaji's mother's interview with Tucker Carlson on his X handle, and called it "Extremely concerning".

Open AI earlier released a statement stating it was 'devastated' to know about the death of the techie.

“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” said an OpenAI spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch.

Balaji-Open AI-copyright infringement

In his interview with The New York Times, Suchir Balaji earlier said he left Open AI because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.

According to reports, he even alleged that OpenAI was violating copyright law.

Speaking on the issue of fair use and generative AI, Balaji earlier wrote on X: "To give some context: I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them. I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies."

"When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on," he said.

"I've written up the more detailed reasons for why I believe this in my post. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but I still feel like it's important for even non-lawyers to understand the law -- both the letter of it, and also why it's actually there in the first place," the techie posted on X.

"That being said, I don't want this to read as a critique of ChatGPT or OpenAI per se, because fair use and generative AI is a much broader issue than any one product or company. I highly encourage ML researchers to learn more about copyright -- it's a really important topic, and precedent that's often cited like Google Books isn't actually as supportive as it might seem," Balaji wrote on X.