OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji’s death: Was it suicide or murder? Crime scene photos reveal bloodstains, & more

The mystery over death of 26-year-old Suchir Balaji, former OpenAI researcher and whistleblower, is getting deeper after new photos from the crime scene surfaced.

Balaji was found dead at his high-end residence in San Francisco’s Buchanan Street last November, months after accusing OpenAI of violating copyright laws while developing ChatGPT.

According to a report by the UK-based newspaper Daily Mail, photos obtained by it showed blood pooled next to the bathroom where Balaji’s head lay and blood also splattered around the bathroom far from the body.

The photos also showed one of Balaji’s wireless earbuds and two mysterious tufts of what appeared to be synthetic hair on the bloodstains.

“Like someone was searching for something".

“After seeing there is so much blood everywhere, I don’t know how they think it’s a suicide, it doesn’t look close," the whistleblower’s father Balaji Ramamurthy told the Daily Mail.

Private autopsy report

Earlier this month, his parents had claimed that a private autopsy report differed from the initial report by the San Francisco Police Department.

His mother Poornima Rao had alleged that Suchir Balaji’s death was a "cold-blooded murder declared by authorities as suicide."

"We hired private investigator and did second autopsy to throw light on cause of death. Private autopsy doesn't confirm the cause of death stated by police. Suchir's apartment was ransacked, sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like some one hit him in bathroom based on blood spots. It's a cold blooded mu*d*r declared by authorities as suicide. Lobbying in San Francisco city doesn't stop us from getting justices. We demand FBi investigation," Poornima Rao wrote on X.

However, the San Francisco Police Department ruled Balaji's death a suicide, stating no evidence of “foul play”.

UCLA pathology professor Dinesh Rao, who was hired by Balaji’s parents, in his preliminary report said the photos show Balaji’s last meal, a half-eaten ready meal with brown rice, still in the plastic tray on his cluttered desk. His kitchen table was also cluttered, some of which spilled onto the floor along with pieces of chocolate.

On October 24, before his death, Balaji had expressed skepticism about the "fair use" of generative artificial intelligence products, stating, "I recently participated in a NYTstory about fair use and generative AI, and why I'm skeptical 'fair use' would be a plausible defence for many generative AI products."

He added, "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. 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," he wrote.