Big Tech whistleblowers parents sue San Francisco, sounding alarm over sons unexpected death
The parents of a young California tech whistleblower whose 2024 death was ruled a suicide are now suing the City and County of San Francisco, alleging they violated public records laws by refusing to fulfill their requests for information about their son’s death.Suchir Balaji, 26, was an employee at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, at the time of his Nov.26, 2024, death.
A San Francisco County medical examiner concluded the next day he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside his apartment.“In the two-plus months since their son’s passing, Petitioners and their counsel have been stymied at every turn as they have sought more information about the cause of and circumstances surrounding Suchir’s tragic death.This petition, they hope, is the beginning of the end of that obstruction,” the lawsuit states.San Francisco City Attorney’s Office spokesperson Jen Kwart told Fox News Digital that once their office is served, they will review the complaint and respond accordingly.“Mr.
Balaji’s death is a tragedy, and our hearts go out to his family,” Kwart said.“It’s really been a nightmare for the last three months for them,” one of the family’s attorneys, Kevin Rooney, told Fox News Digital. Just days before he died, Balaji was “upbeat and happy” during a trip to Catalina Island with his friends for his 26th birthday, the complaint filed Jan.31 says.The lawsuit describes Balaji as a “child prodigy with a particular interest in and talent for coding.” He attended the University of California at Berkeley, and, upon graduating, was hired as an AI researcher at OpenAI.“In that position, he was integral in OpenAI’s efforts to gather and organize data from the internet used to train GPT-4, a language model used by the company’s now-ubiquitous online chatbot, ChatGPT,” the complaint says.By August 2024, however, Balaji “had become disillusioned with OpenAI’s business practices and decided to leave to ...