Who was Suchir Balaji, whistleblower found dead after accusing OpenAI of copyright violation?

A former Indian-American employee of OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, was recently found dead at his apartment in San Francisco after accusing the AI giant of violating copyright law. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) identified the deceased as 26-year-old Suchir Balaji. “The manner of death has been determined as suicide. The OCME has notified the next-of-kin and has no further comments or reports for publication at this time,” the OCME said in a statement to the media.

OpenAI responded to Balaji’s death by saying it was ‘devastated’. “We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones during this difficult time,” a spokesperson of the company was quoted as saying by TechCrunch.

Local authorities, including the police department and medics, found no evidence of foul play and are treating the case as suicide.

Who wasSuchir Balaji?

Balaji studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and then went on to working for OpenAI.

While in college, Balaji is understood to have interned at OpenAI and Scale AI.

During his early days at OpenAI, Balaji worked on WebGPT, and later went on to work on the pretraining team for GPT-4, reasoning team with o1, and post-training for ChatGPT, his LinkedIn states.

Notably, Balaji left OpenAI in August this year, ending his four-year stint at the AI giant. In October, he said in an interview that he won’t work for technologies that bring more harm than benefit to society. “I no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that I believe would bring society more harm than benefit,” Balaji told the New York Times. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji added.

Balaji was also reportedly named in a court filing submitted against OpenAI over alleged copyright violation. Several firms, including Microsoft, its biggest investor, and newspapers have sued OpenAI over breaking copyright laws.

US billionaire Elon Musk has also reacted to Balaji’s death on X.

Hmm https://t.co/HsElym3uLV — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2024

OpenAI faced several lawsuits from writers, programmers and journalists in 2022 who accused OpenAI of unlawfully using their content to train its AI model. Balaji also said in his interview that ChatGPT would negatively impact businesses and entrepreneurs whose information was utilised to train ChatGPT.

(With inputs from agencies)