Who was Suchir Balaji, OpenAI Whistleblower Who Committed Suicide Day After Being Named in Lawsuit?

New Delhi: Indian-American tech researcher Suchir Balaji, 26, who openly criticized the use of copyrighted data in artificial intelligence (AI), was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26. Authorities have confirmed the death as suicide and ruled out any foul play.  

Balaji, a computer science graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, had interned with OpenAI and Scale AI during his college years. He joined OpenAI in 2019 and during his four years at the company, he worked on several projects, including GPT-4 training and improving ChatGPT’s performance. He left OpenAI in August this year, expressing concerns over the potential harm OpenAI could cause.  

Speaking to the New York Times, he explained his decision to quit, saying, “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company.”  

Balaji was outspoken about what he called OpenAI’s misuse of copyrighted materials to train generative AI models. In October, he posted on X (formerly Twitter), “Fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they’re trained on.”  

He also criticized the company’s reliance on ‘fair use’ as a defense, arguing in a blog post cited by the Chicago Tribune that the training of AI systems like ChatGPT raised significant legal and ethical concerns. “No known factors seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data,” he wrote.  

Just a day before his death, Balaji’s name was mentioned in a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. Though details about his involvement remain unclear, his public criticism of the company’s data usage practices likely drew attention to his stance on ethical AI development.