^{From Cyrus Farivar, Richard Nieva And Rashi ShrivastavaForbes contributor}

Suchir Balaji, a whistleblower who formerly worked at AI juggernaut OpenAI, was found dead of suicide in his San Francisco apartment late last month, both local police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said.

“No evidence of crime was found during the initial investigation,” Officer Robert Rueca, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department, wrote in an email Forbes.

Balaji’s death on Nov. 26 was first reported Friday by the San Jose Mercury News. In October, the 26-year-old researcher left OpenAI, claiming the AI ​​giant violated copyright law by crawling the Internet and infringing copyrighted works to train its AI models. He further claimed that using this data would harm the entire internet ecosystem.

“If you believe what I believe, you just have to leave the company,” he told the New York Times.

“While generative models rarely produce results that are substantially similar to their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of proprietary data,” Balaji wrote on his personal website at the time. “If these copies are unauthorized, this could potentially be considered copyright infringement, depending on whether the specific use of the model qualifies as ‘fair use’ or not.”

OpenAI has denied its claims and broader allegations that it violated copyright law.

Balaji worked at OpenAI for four years, helping to collect and organize training data for OpenAI’s star product ChatGPT. According to the New York Times, he worked on a “personal project” after leaving OpenAI.

Balaji’s death came a day after a court filing specifically named him as someone whose professional records OpenAI would search as part of a lawsuit by numerous authors who had sued the startup. OpenAI agreed to “identify documents in his custody file (if any) that relate to alleged copyright concerns he recently raised following his employment with OpenAI.”

In a statement, OpenAI expressed its condolences on the death of Balaji.

“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today, and our thoughts are with Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” Jason Deutrom, a spokesman, wrote by email Forbes.

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