Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former researcher at OpenAI and a vocal critic of the company’s AI practices, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26. Police have ruled the death a suicide, with no evidence of foul play.
San Francisco police were alerted to Balaji’s flat after friends and colleagues expressed concerns about his welfare. Upon arrival, officers found his body. The city’s chief medical examiner’s office confirmed the cause of death as suicide.
“Officers and medics arrived on scene and located a deceased adult male from what appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation,” the San Francisco Chronicle quoted from a police statement.
Balaji had resigned from OpenAI in August, accusing the company of using copyrighted material without proper authorisation to train its generative AI models, including ChatGPT. In an interview with The New York Times, Balaji claimed that OpenAI’s practices were harmful to the internet ecosystem, businesses, and individuals whose data was used without consent.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he had said in the interview.
Balaji’s final post on X (formerly Twitter) on October 24 highlighted his scepticism about the legal defence of fair use by generative AI companies: “I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I’m sceptical ‘fair use’ would be a plausible defence for a lot of generative AI products,” he wrote.
He added that generative AI products create substitutes that directly compete with the data they are trained on, undermining their claim to fair use.
Balaji’s allegations have been central to several lawsuits filed against OpenAI by authors, programmers, and journalists, who accuse the company of illegally using their copyrighted works to enhance AI capabilities. His death has sparked shock and sadness online, with Tesla CEO Elon Musk cryptically responding with a “hmm” on X.