It didn’t take long for Suchir Balaji’s death to become a conspiracy.
San Francisco police had only just announced the death of the 26-year-old — a software engineer who had recently made damaging claims about OpenAI, his former employer — when the speculation exploded.
Something “nefarious” happened to Balaji, observers posited on X after he was found dead Nov. 26 in his Buchanan Street apartment. He was the victim of a “hit.” The circumstances were “very suspicious.” He must have been assassinated, posters said, to prevent him from further harming one of the world’s most valuable AI companies.
San Francisco authorities ruled the death a suicide, and police said they found “no evidence of foul play.” But in the absence of further information, the story has taken on a life of its own. A coalition of right-wing pundits, conspiracy-minded journalists, crypto enthusiasts, and now, Balaji’s parents, are filling the information vacuum, with some exploiting his death to generate millions off a crypto coin named in his memory.
A family in shock
Like all good conspiracy theories, this one begins with solid facts: A month before his death, Balaji told The New York Times that OpenAI, his employer of four years, was illegally training ChatGPT on copyrighted data. He later pledged to testify in The Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI, the Associated Press reported.
On Dec. 14, nearly three weeks after his death, Balaji’s mother took to X with a shocking message: “We are the parents of happy, smart and brave young man Suchir, found dead in his [apartment] on 11/26/2024,” Poornima Ramarao wrote. “We are seeking to know complete truth, we need more answers.”
Ramarao tagged X owner Elon Musk, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Vivek Ramaswamy in the post, which was followed by a flood of others calling for a “comprehensive investigation” and announcing that the family had hired a private investigator and secured a second autopsy.
In interviews with national media, Ramarao insisted her son couldn’t have been suicidal. He was a high achiever, she said, a child prodigy. Somebody with no reason to end his life.
“His time of death is few hours after his last call with family,” she wrote in her initial tweet. “We don’t understand within few hours what happened.”
In an interview with The Standard, Ramarao and her husband, Balaji Ramamurthy, doubled down on these assertions, saying they believed their son was murdered at the behest of OpenAI and other artificial intelligence companies. “It’s a $100 billion industry that’d be turned upside down by his testimony,” Ramarao said. “It could be a group of people involved, a group of companies, a complete nexus.”
Ramarao sees danger everywhere. She accused the city government of facilitating a cover-up. She suspected that a secondary pathologist she hired was “hand-in-glove involved” with the San Francisco medical examiner who conducted the official autopsy. She charged her own attorney, with whom she is no longer working, of “changing the narrative.” At one point, she accused a Bay Area television station of passing notes to OpenAI, then accused a Standard reporter of being “paid PR.”
Ramarao claimed that the secondary autopsy proved her son was shot in the back of the head from an angle at which he could not have shot himself. From blood spatter on the bathroom floor, she surmised that Balaji was trying to escape. “There was an assault on him,” she insisted. “He was brushing his teeth. His toothbrush had fallen down. He was attacked from behind.”
The family declined to provide to The Standard the secondary autopsy report, and the private pathologist did not respond to a request for comment. The family’s new attorney, Joe Goethals, cautioned that the autopsy may not provide incontrovertible proof.
“I would not characterize it as conclusively proving murder,” he told The Standard, though he added that the family was “not satisfied with the premature conclusion of the medical examiner in this case.”
David Serrano Sewell, director of the office of the city’s chief medical examiner, said “there are no reports for issuance at this time” when asked for a copy of Balaji’s autopsy.
The National Association of Medical Examiners requires that departments complete most postmortem reports within 90 days to receive accreditation. Balaji died 43 days ago.
The San Francisco Police Department declined to share a full incident report, citing the “active and open investigation.”
OpenAI said in a statement that it first became aware of Balaji’s concerns after the article in The New York Times and had “no record of any further interaction with him.” The statement added: “We respect his, and others’, right to share views freely.”
The theories spread
Seemingly reeling from the death of her son, Ramarao has only added fuel to an already raging online conspiracy fire. Even before Balaji’s family issued a statement, X influencer accounts had seized on the narrative, suggesting foul play. Hours after the news of Balaji’s death broke Dec. 13, the popular tech account Autism Capital posted about it on X, saying: “They’re really out here offing whistleblowers in these streets lmao … AI wars are real.”
Suspicion quickly spread to other accounts: “DARK QUESTIONS SURROUND OPENAI WHISTLEBLOWER’S DEATH,” business influencer Mario Nawfal shouted to his 1.8 million followers. “Anti-woke activist” Robby Starbuck got in on the action, calling Balaji’s death “very suspicious,” as did Collin Rugg, owner of right-wing news site Trending Politics. Many of the accounts possessed similar identities: uber-online, vaguely right-wing techies with an incentive to drum up controversy in order to boost their clout.
The conspiracy theorists also shared something else: Many were friendly with — or fans of — X owner Musk, who has been embroiled in a public battle with OpenAI for more than a year. Musk co-founded OpenAI along with Altman and nine other people in 2015 but left in 2018, citing possible conflicts of interest with his role at Tesla. He has since founded his own AI company and is suing OpenAI to prevent it from becoming a for-profit entity. And he has eagerly engaged in the Balaji conspiracy chatter, writing “Hmm” on a post about the death and commenting “Concerning,” under one of Nawfal’s posts.
When Ramarao tweeted about hiring the private investigator, Musk replied: “This doesn’t seem like a suicide.”
The posts have led to a groundswell of support: The family has raised more than $200,000 through crypto donations and GoFundMe; one supporter created a crypto “memecoin” named after Balaji, the total value of which is currently around $1.5 million.
An especially devoted follower created an account called “Suchir Justice Movement” that posts daily updates on the case — often retweeting Balaji’s mother — and helped the parents set up a crypto wallet to collect donations. The owner of the account, a 38-year-old living in Los Angeles who asked not to be named, told The Standard he learned of Balaji’s death through the memecoin and became invested in the story after reading more. While he said he is “not a big conspiracy person,” he is convinced that Balaji’s death was not a suicide, and created the X account and a corresponding Telegram group to keep interest in the story alive.
“I didn’t want someone to launch this coin, make a bunch of money, and for it to just be dead,” he said. “I saw it as a catalyst for people who believe in Suchir.”
Another supporter, a Bay Area realtor named Girish Bangalore who said he attended engineering school with Ramarao in India, created an online petition to demand a “comprehensive investigation” into the death. It has more than 13,000 signatures.
Bangalore said he’d like to see a full report from the medical examiner. “The public officials should come out with their investigative report,” he told The Standard about the online theories. “The fact that they’re not doing that only adds to that story.”
The family briefly partnered with George Webb, a self-described “independent journalist” who has posted conspiracy theories about Covid and the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump. Webb’s X account — which two weeks ago was littered with videos about murder suspect Luigi Mangione — is now filled with amateur crime scene analyses that he insists prove Balaji was murdered. Last week, Webb posted a video with Balaji’s parents, claiming they had just toured their son’s apartment and were about to walk around asking neighbors if they’d heard gunshots.
Less than a week later, it appeared the relationship had soured: Ramarao wrote on X that Webb “broke our trust” and was “making statements that are not accurate.” Webb responded with his own post, saying “no good deed goes unpunished” and suggesting the family was ungrateful for his help. He continues to post about the case. Webb did not respond to a request for comment.
At times, the theories have veered into absurdity. The Suchir Justice Movement account, with which Ramarao frequently interacts, at one point questioned whether Balaji could have met with Mangione in San Francisco to discuss United Healthcare. The latest obsession of the theorists is that OpenAI has “scrubbed all references” of Balaji from ChatGPT. That is demonstrably false: When The Standard queried ChatGPT, it returned 500 words detailing Balaji’s life, work history, and death. It even linked to one of Webb’s videos.
Beneath the posting and the theorizing, Ramarao and Ramamurthy are a mother and father devastated by the loss of their son. Reading Balaji’s journal after his death only made the loss more acute, Ramarao told The Standard. “He talks about Buddha, he talks about the soul, he talks about God,” she said. “He tries to draw parallels between the material world and spiritual world: very abstract and very deep. He was above all of our thinking.”
Bangalore, the friend who started the petition, described Ramarao and Ramamurthy as parents “under tremendous stress.” “On one side is the trauma of losing their only child,” Bangalore said. “On the other side is, they’re immigrants from a foreign country that don’t really know what to do or how things work here.”
When asked about Balaji’s state of mind after blowing the whistle on his employer, Ramarao said she noticed he was “very afraid” and acting unusually. Ramamurthy said his son had “fear and anxiousness.” But both parents were adamant that Balaji did not die by suicide. “He was very proud of what he was doing — where is the depression?” Ramarao said. “How do you think it’s suicide? It’s brutal murder. Cold-blooded murder.”