OpenAI whistleblower, Suchir Balaji found dead in San Francisco apartment

A 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher, Suchir Balaji, was found de@d in his San Francisco apartment in recent weeks.

Balaji left OpenAI earlier this year and raised concerns publicly that the company had allegedly violated U.S. copyright law while developing its popular ChatGPT chatbot.

“The manner of de@th has been determined to be su!cide,” David Serrano Sewell, executive director of San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, told CNBC in an email on Friday, Dec. 13. He said Balaji’s next of kin have been notified.

The San Francisco Police Department said in an e-mail that on the afternoon of Nov. 26, officers were called to an apartment on Buchanan Street to conduct a “wellbeing check.”

They found a dece@sed adult male, and discovered “no evidence of foul play” in their initial investigation, the department said.

In October, The New York Times published a story about Balaji’s concerns.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji told the paper. He reportedly believed that ChatGPT and other chatbots like it would destroy the commercial viability of people and organizations who created the digital data and content now widely used to train AI systems.

A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed Balaji’s death.

“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,” the spokesperson said in an email.

OpenAI is currently involved in legal disputes with a number of publishers, authors and artists over alleged use of copyrighted material for AI training data.

A lawsuit filed by news outlets last December seeks to hold OpenAI and principal backer Microsoft accountable for billions of dollars in damages.

“We actually don’t need to train on their data,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at an event organized by Bloomberg in Davos earlier this year. “I think this is something that people don’t understand. Any one particular training source, it doesn’t move the needle for us that much.”