A former OpenAI researcher and whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, was found dead at age 26 in his San Francisco apartment. His death was ruled a suicide by the medical examiner's office, with police finding no evidence of foul play.

Balaji had recently exposed OpenAI's alleged copyright violations in training ChatGPT, information that was expected to be crucial in ongoing lawsuits against the company. He had publicly accused OpenAI of illegally using copyrighted material to train its AI models, contributing to several high-profile lawsuits from authors, programmers, and news organizations including The New York Times.

Joining OpenAI in 2020 at age 21, Balaji was initially drawn to AI's potential to advance technology and medicine. However, his perspective shifted dramatically in 2022 when he became concerned about his role in gathering internet data for GPT-4 development, which he believed violated U.S. fair use laws.

The Berkeley computer science graduate had posted detailed analysis on his website arguing that OpenAI's data collection practices were "destroying the commercial viability" of content creators whose work was used without permission to train AI systems. In October, he told The New York Times, "If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company. This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole."

Court documents filed on November 18 by The New York Times identified Balaji as possessing "unique and relevant documents" crucial to their case against OpenAI, among at least a dozen other current and former employees.

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