OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

According to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, a former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment. In October, the 26-year-old AI researcher raised concerns that OpenAI violated copyright law in an interview with The New York Times.

“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the deceased as Suchir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The manner of death was determined to be suicide,” a spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “OCME has notified next of kin and has no further comment or reports to release at this time.”

After nearly four years at OpenAI, Balaji left the company when he realized the technology would do more harm than good to society, he told the New York Times. Balaji’s main concern was the way OpenAI allegedly used proprietary data, and he believed these practices were harming the Internet.

“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today, and our condolences go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Balaji was found dead in his Buchanan Street apartment on November 26th. Police were reportedly called to his home in the Lower Haight neighborhood to conduct a health check on the former OpenAI researcher.

“I was at OpenAI for almost four years and have been working on ChatGPT for the last year and a half,” Balaji said in an October tweet. “At first I didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc., but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. As I tried to understand the problem better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems to be a fairly implausible defense for many generative AI products, for the main reason that they can create replacement products that work with the trained ones Data competes on.”

OpenAI and Microsoft are currently embroiled in several ongoing lawsuits from newspapers and media publishers, including the New York Times, who claim the generative AI startup violated copyright law.

Before working at OpenAI, the 26-year-old researcher studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. During his studies, he completed an internship at OpenAI and Scale AI, where he later worked.

Balaji, in his early days at OpenAI, worked on WebGPT, a fine-tuned version of GPT-3 that could search the web. It was an early version of SearchGPT that OpenAI released earlier this year. Later, Balaji worked on the pre-training team for GPT-4, the reasoning team with o1, and the post-training team for ChatGPT, according to his LinkedIn account.

The San Francisco Police Department did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.