OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead in San Francisco Apartment

Suchir Balaji.

A former OpenAI researcher who blew the whistle on the company’s data scraping practices — accusing it of violating copyright law — has been found dead in his San Francisco apartment.

Part of Suchir Balaji’s job was to gather enormous amounts of data for OpenAI’s GPT-4 multimodal AI. At the time, he treated it as a research project and didn’t think that the product he was working on would ultimately turn out to be a chatbot with an integrated AI image generator.

But when the research project turned into an actual product, Balaji believed that OpenAI was threatening the very entities that it had taken the data from to build its AI tools.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji told The New York Times in October.

Police Confirm Death

The 26-year-old was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, as confirmed by San Francisco police and the office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

“The manner of death has been determined to be suicide,” David Serrano Sewell, executive director of San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, tells CNBC. Balaji’s next of kin have been notified.

The San Francisco Police Department conducted a “well-being check” at an apartment on Buchanan Street on the afternoon of November 26. Officers discovered a deceased adult male and said there was “no evidence of foul play” in the department’s initial investigation.

The San Jose Mercury News, which first reported on Balaji’s death, notes that the whistleblower was expected to “play a key part” in upcoming lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company. OpenAI is facing multiple lawsuits by individuals and publishing companies for its data scraping practices.

The New York Times, which is one of the publishers suing OpenAI, named Balaji in a November 18 letter filed to a federal court stating that he was a person who had “unique and relevant documents” that would support its case against OpenAI.

A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed Balaji’s death and gave the following statement to CNBC.

“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.”

If you are in crisis, call the toll-free National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The service is available to anyone. All calls are confidential.