Sam Altman Claims Suicide, Elon Musk Says Murder: How Did OpenAI's Suchir Balaji Die?

Last Updated:September 11, 2025, 20:34 IST

While the police ruled out foul play and confirmed death by suicide in February, Suchir Balaji's parents have repeatedly claimed that he had been murdered in cold blood

OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji as seen in CCTV footage, grabbing dinner on the day of his death. (Image: @RaoPoornima/X)

OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji’s death under mysterious circumstances last year made headlines once again as CEO Sam Altman made a statement that the young researcher had died by suicide with Tesla maker Elon Musk quick to retaliate and call it a “murder".

While the San Francisco police ruled out play and confirmed death by suicide in February, Balaji’s parents have repeatedly claimed that he had been murdered in cold blood. They even rejected the autopsy report, flagging numerous inconsistencies, and have continued their own investigation.

This is not the first time Musk has made the “murder" claim about Balaji’s death, who has remained firm in his belief since Day 1 and has also extended support to his parents.

Let’s take a look at the case:

WHO WAS SUCHIR BALAJI?

Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old Indian American researcher and former OpenAI employee, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26.

An accomplished computer scientist, who studied at the University of California, Berkeley, Balaji interned with OpenAI and Scale AI and, after graduation, joined the former as a full-time employee.

At OpenAI, he worked on several key projects including WebGPT and GPT-4’s pretraining. His role later expanded to the reasoning team and post-training for ChatGPT, as per his LinkedIn profile.

After more than four years, during which he became an integral part of OpenAI’s development team, he left the organisation citing ethical concerns about the societal implications of the technology.

BALAJI, THE WHISTLEBLOWER

In October 2024, Balaji made headlines when he spoke to The New York Times about his concerns regarding OpenAI’s approach to copyright.

Before this, in a blog post, he had discussed broader issues with the technology’s societal impact, which he believed outweighed its potential benefits. He questioned if the company’s use of copyrighted data to train its models was ethical or legal.

In fact, reports suggest that the researcher was named in a court filing related to a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. In an effort to address the lawsuit, the company even agreed to review files tied to Balaji’s expressed concerns about data usage.

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The News Desk is a team of passionate editors and writers who break and analyse the most important events unfolding in India and abroad. From live updates to exclusive reports to in-depth explainers, the Desk d...

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News world Sam Altman Claims Suicide, Elon Musk Says Murder: How Did OpenAI's Suchir Balaji Die?

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