OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had endured a long and uncomfortable grilling on Tucker Carlson over the death of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, and now his claims in the interview are being attacked directly by Balaji’s mother.
Poornima Ramarao, the mother dead OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, has launched a scathing attack on Sam Altman. Ramarao says that Altman was “full of lies” during his interview with Tucker Carlson. She alleged that Altman had doctored the investigative report to show Balaji’s death as a suicide instead of a murder.
“If you watch his body language, and how he’s fidgeting — he doesn’t look straight when (Tucker Carlson) asks him a question,” Poornima Ramarao said in an interview with Republic. “Whenever Suchir’s question comes, he looks down and talks. And for every question that Tucker has, he pushes back on him instead of answering it. He’s evasive. What he’s doing is gaslighting Tucker. He just says in a very sweet tone, “family needs respect, family needs space”,” she added, hinting that Altman was using Balaji’s family as an excuse to not come clean on his death.
“He’s full of lies,” Ramarao added. “The most interesting point is that he says there were multiple investigations, and there were two police reports. We’ve only seen one police report — the first report. He saw the first report and he changed it, so there’s a second report. He’s the only one who’s seen the second report. There was only one report, that report was altered, and a second report was released,” she alleged.
Ramarao also seemd to claim that some powerful forces had caused the report on their son’s death to be altered. “On 29th December, our attorney called the deputy police inspector, and the inspector told him that it was a murder. The next day (the inspector) calls and says, oh, this is a suicide,” she said.
Ramarao also attacked Altman’s claims that he was friends with Balaji, saying that HR had sent them a letter saying that the two had never interacted directly. “Sam said that Suchir was his friend. He was not his friend. We can prove this based on his journal, we can prove it on the basis of what he shared with his friend in the last week of his life. And HR has written an email saying that Sam never interacted with Suchir directly. How can he call him a friend? Suchir hated him. He wanted to join his sister’s rape lawsuit. (Sam) is such a low-moral person,” she said.
Ramarao was referring to the lawsuit filed by Sam Altman’s sister, Ann Altman, claiming that she had been sexually abused and raped by Sam Altman when they were young. Ann Altman had said that Sam “groomed and manipulated” her and performed sex acts on her between 1997 and 2006, including “rape, sexual assault, molestation, sodomy, and battery”. Ann Altman said she sustained “great bodily injury”, severe emotional distress and depression from the abuse. Sam Altman, along with his two brothers and their mother, had rejected the claims. “All of these claims are utterly untrue,” a joint statement from them said. “Caring for a family member who faces mental health challenges is incredibly difficult,” it added.
Suchir Balaji had been an OpenAI researcher who’d been found dead in his San Francisco apartment by authorities on 26th November 2025. Not long before that, Balaji had appeared as the focal point of a New York Times article, in which he’d accused OpenAI of breaking copyright law. Balaji was also due to testify in court over his claims before he was found dead. The circumstances of Suchir Balaji’s death had been mysterious, and his parents have been running from pillar to post to get their son’s death investigated. Incidentally, copyright law is a very high-stakes issue in the AI world — Anthropic had recently reportedly reached an agreement to pay book publishers $1.5 billion for training their models on their copyrighted material. And with such sums of money on the line, it does seem that the death of an OpenAI whistleblower who had accused the company of breaking copyright law, and was due to testify in the courts against it, does warrant some serious inspection.