The death of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji right after he’d accused the company of breaking copyright law had been buried under more recent developments, but it’s come to the fore in a new interview of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman with Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson confronted the issue of Suchir Balaji’s death head on in an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Carlson had previously interviewed Suchir Balaji’s parents, and likely drew from that experience for his interview with Altman. 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.
“You’ve had complaints from a programmer who basically said that you guys were basically stealing people’s (copyrighted) stuff and not paying them, and he would up murdered. What was that?” Carlson asked Altman.
“Also a great tragedy..he committed suicide,” Altman replied. Tucker seemed incredulous about the assertion of Balaji’s death being a suicide, and asked Altman if he’d looked into the details of the case. “This is a guy that was a friend of mine — not a close friend, but this is someone that worked at OpenAI for a very long time. I was really shaken by this tragedy. I spent a lot of time trying to read everything I could about what happened. It looks like a suicide to me,” Altman said.
“Why does it look like a suicide?” Carlson probed. “It was the gun he had purchased, it was — this is gruesome to talk about — does it not look like a suicide to you?” Altman countered.
“No he was definitely murdered,” Carlson said. “There were signs of a struggle, the wires of the surveillance cameras had been cut, he’d just ordered takeout food, he’d come back from a vacation with his friends on Catalina Island. There was no indication at all that he was suicidal, no note, and no behaviour — he’d just spoken to a family member on the phone. And then he’s found dead with blood in multiple rooms. It seems really obvious he was murdered,” Carlson added.
At this point, things in the interview escalated. “His mother claims he was murdered on your orders,” Carlson said. “Do you believe that,” Altman testily replied. “I think it is worth looking into,” Carlson replied.
“I haven’t done too many interviews where I’ve been accused of like — ” Altman said. “I’m not accusing you at all. I’m just saying that his mother says that,” Carlson said, while
“You understand how this sounds like an accusation,” Altman said, his voice becoming lower and him sounding like he was barely keeping his composure. Carlson reiterated that he wasn’t accusing Altman of anything, but it was worth finding out what happened, and he didn’t understand why San Francisco wasn’t investigating further.
“I feel strange and sad debating this, you’re sort of accusing me,” Altman said. Altman tried hinting that discussing the issue didn’t honour Balaji’s memory, but Carlson immediately hit back, saying that he was asking questions at the behest of Balaji’s parents, so he definitely wasn’t disrespecting his memory. “Why were the blood stains in two rooms, why were the camera wires cut, and why was there a wig in the room that wasn’t his,” Carlson asked. “Who orders Doordash and then shoots themselves. I’ve covered a lot of crimes as a police reporter, and I’ve seen nothing like this,” Carlson said.
At this point, Altman really seemed to be at a loss for words. “At this point, it gets a little bit painful, and not the level of respect I’d show to someone with this kind of mental (illness),” Altman said slowly, his head bowed, and his vocal tone lower than ever.
It was an incredible exchange, and not one you expect in an interview with a tech CEO. But 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 that had accused the company of breaking copyright law, and was due to testify in the courts against it, does warrant serious inspection.