OpenAI employee Suchir Balaji’s death officially ruled a suicide: Report

The death of ex-OpenAI employee Suchir Balajir, 26, who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, 2024, has been ruled a suicide by the San Francisco County Medical Examiner in a final report, per the Mercury News outlet on February 15.

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said there was not enough evidence to find that Balaji’s death was due to homicide.

On the same day, Balaji’s mother Poornima Rao on X called for a transparent investigation and claimed that SFPD wrote “inaccurate information” in the autopsy and police report. Balaji’s family had contested previous reports of his alleged death by suicide, with his mother calling his death a “cold-blooded murder.”

Balaji was an OpenAI employee-turned-whistleblower who criticised the way the ChatGPT-maker allegedly scraped copyrighted data in order to create its products. He took his findings to The New York Times, which is also embroiled in a legal case with OpenAI over the same issue.

“Given the existence of a data licensing market, training on copyrighted data without a similar licensing agreement is also a type of market harm, because it deprives the copyright holder of a source of revenue,” Balaji wrote in a post on his website around a month before his death, referencing OpenAI and Google’s data licensing agreements with various social and news platforms.

Balaji’s mother has endorsed a cryptocurrency project that encouraged donations in order to support a token in Suchir’s name and fund the family’s legal costs. However, the investment token’s origins and leadership remain unknown. The token has lost most of its value since being launched late in 2024.

Those in distress can seek help and counselling by calling helplines from this link.