Indian AI startup CEO Suchana Seth arrested following 4-year-old son’s murder: report

The CEO of an Indian AI startup has been arrested for the alleged murder of her 4-year-old son after the child’s remains were found inside her luggage, reports say. 

Suchana Seth, who leads The Mindful AI Lab, was taken into custody in the southern Karnataka state on Monday after authorities got in contact with a taxi driver transporting her and asked him to bring her to the nearest police station, Reuters reports, citing Goa police official Paresh Naik. 

Naik said Seth checked into a hotel in the Goa state on Saturday, but the boy was missing when she checked out of the property Monday night, according to Reuters. 

Naik told the news agency that hotel cleaning staff found blood stains inside Seth’s room and notified police. 

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“When her luggage was opened, the child’s dead body was found,” North Goa Superintendent of Police Nidhin Valsa was quoted by Reuters as saying. 

The circumstances surrounding the alleged murder are unclear, but Indian news website The Week said Seth reportedly told police that she and her husband are estranged, and divorce proceedings are ongoing. 

Seth has now been brought back to the Goa state for reported interrogations while her husband, who was in Indonesia at the time of the killing, has been asked to return to India, according to Reuters. 

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Suchana Seth’s company is based in the Indian tech hub of Bengaluru, according to Reuters. (Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

The 39-year-old’s company, which is based in Bangaluru, says on its website that “We are a team with deep expertise in AI ethics and hands-on prototyping, deployment and scaling of machine learning systems.  

“We understand the data science project life cycle end to end. We understand the challenges of deploying AI systems in the real world. We believe in the value of human-in-the-loop AI systems, and we empower humans to build ethical AI,” it adds. 

Seth’s LinkedIn page describes her as an “AI ethics expert and data scientist with over 12 years of experience in mentoring data science teams, and scaling machine learning solutions at startups and industry research labs” and that she was “a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.” 

Suchana Seth was a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, her LinkedIn bio states. People are shown here walking at the Harvard University campus in June 2023 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ( Scott Eisen/Getty Images / Getty Images)

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On Harvard’s website, it said “At Berkman, Suchana [was] studying ways to operationalize ethical machine learning and AI in the industry. Her interests include auditing algorithms for fairness, accountability and transparency in machine learning, monetizing AI ethically, security vulnerabilities specific to machine learning and AI systems, and the regulatory landscape for predictive algorithms.”