He accused OpenAI of copyright violations. Months later, he's dead

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI researcher of four years, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, 2024.

Balaji, who left the company in August, had recently accused OpenAI of copyright violations related to how they used internet data to train AI models like ChatGPT. The 26-year-old whistleblower’s death has been ruled a suicide.

“While generative models rarely produce outputs that are substantially similar to any of their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of copyrighted data,” Balaji said in his open letter.

Balaji also spoke to The New York Times in an interview, where he accused OpenAI of misusing copyrighted data for ChatGPT development. He worked at OpenAI for “nearly 4 years,” and then on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them.

“I came to the conclusion that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet,” he said during the interview, saying that AI isn’t a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.

The San Francisco Police Department found Balaji’s body in his SF apartment. A day before that, his name appeared in a court filing as part of a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI—in which the company spent a good year and more dealing with those, mainly from publications.

In November, OpenAI secured a legal victory as a judge dismissed a copyright lawsuit against the Microsoft-backed company brought by publishers Alternet and Raw Story.

But, the fight is not over just yet, as the plaintiffs planned to file an amended complaint seeking to address the court’s concerns and continue their legal battle.