Suchir Balaji (November 21, 1998 – November 26, 2024) was an American artificial intelligence researcher. He died several weeks after accusing his former employer, OpenAI, of breaking United States copyright law. Balaji's death received wide attention because his parents and others said there might have been foul play, and because he was seen as a whistleblower. The San Francisco Police Department said they found "no evidence of foul play," and the Chief Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide.

Balaji was born in Florida^[1][2] on November 21, 1998, in an Indian-American family.^[3] He grew up in Cupertino, California, where both of his parents worked in the technology industry.^[1] He began coding at age 11 using the children's programming tool Scratch, and built his own computer when he was 13.^[4]

Balaji attended Monta Vista High School and was a finalist in the 2015–16 season of the United States of America Computing Olympiad.^[5][6] In 2017, he placed 7th in a Kaggle "Passenger Screening Algorithm Challenge" sponsored by the TSA, and won $100,000 in prize money.^[6][7] He won first place in the 2017 Pacific Northwest Regional and Berkeley Programming Contests, and placed 31st in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest 2018 World Finals.^[8][9] He wrote a paper on chip design at age 14. At 17, he took a gap year and worked as a software developer at Quora.^[4][10]

After his gap year, Balaji attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a BA in computer science. While in college, he interned at Scale AI in 2019. He joined OpenAI after graduating in 2021.^[10]

John Schulman, a cofounder of OpenAI, recruited Balaji directly after college. Balaji worked at OpenAI for almost four years as an artificial intelligence researcher.^[10] Among other work, he helped collect and organize internet data used to train GPT-4, a language model behind the company's chatbot ChatGPT. He also worked on an earlier model called WebGPT. In an online eulogy, Schulman wrote that "Suchir’s contributions to this project were essential, and it wouldn’t have succeeded without him."^[11][12]

Balaji left OpenAI in August 2024 after becoming disappointed with what he saw as the company's business practices. He said, "If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company."^[13] After leaving, he said he was working on "personal projects."^[14] According to an interview with his mother, he planned to start a nonprofit focused on machine learning and neuroscience. His mother also said, "He felt AI is a harm to humanity."^[15][4]

In an October 23, 2024 New York Times interview, Balaji said that products like ChatGPT break United States copyright law because they are trained on the work of business competitors, and because the outputs of these chatbots can imitate and replace those products.^[13] He argued that ChatGPT and similar systems hurt the ability of people and organizations to make money from the works that are used to train the AI models.^[16][13]

The New York Times article summarized Balaji's essay "When does generative AI qualify for fair use?",^[17] which he had published on his personal website earlier that week. In the essay, he used a mathematical analysis of outputs from chatbots such as ChatGPT and argued that they do not pass the four-factor test for determining fair use under U.S. copyright law.^[16][13] He also suggested that his argument could apply to other generative AI products, not just OpenAI's systems.^[17]

At the time, OpenAI was already being sued for copyright infringement by several well-known authors and news organizations, including The New York Times. In a November 18, 2024 court filing, lawyers for The New York Times listed Balaji as one of several people who might have "relevant documents" in the copyright case against OpenAI. Several other people named in the filings were current or former OpenAI employees.^[18] Balaji said he was willing to testify against OpenAI.^{[14] [11]} Unlike some other OpenAI whistleblowers, Balaji did not reveal any previously unknown internal information about the company.^[10]

The New York Times article quoted Stanford University law professor Mark Lemley, who disagreed that generative AI services as described by Balaji clearly violate copyright law, and intellectual property lawyer Bradley Hulbert, who said new laws might be needed to decide the legal questions.^[13] Months after Balaji's death, which had drawn widespread public attention, Hulbert told Fortune that Balaji's essay "reads like the argument of a really smart non-lawyer who read up on the subject but does not have a thorough understanding." Another intellectual property lawyer, quoted anonymously by the magazine because of concerns about conspiracy theories connected to Balaji's death, said that Balaji's argument "misunderstands the law in some fundamental ways."^[10]

OpenAI responded that its software is "grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation," and that it is "trained on publicly available data."^[14]

Balaji's parents say they last heard from him on November 22, 2024. When he stopped answering text messages, they asked San Francisco police to check on him at his home with a well-being check.^[19] On November 26, 2024, police found Balaji dead in his apartment with a single gunshot wound to the head.^[10] He was 26 years old.^[14] The gun found at the scene was registered to Balaji, who had bought it in January 2024.^[10]

On February 14, 2025, the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) released an autopsy report. It concluded that Balaji died from a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound on the same day that police discovered his body. Police reported that the only entrance to the apartment was locked with a deadbolt from the inside, and that Balaji had recently searched for information about brain anatomy on his computer. Toxicology tests showed alcohol, amphetamine and GHB in his system.^[a][18][20]

Because of his role as a possible "custodial witness" in The New York Times's lawsuit against OpenAI, and his public claims that OpenAI violated AI copyright law and followed poor AI ethics practices, Balaji's death attracted major public and media interest. News coverage also highlighted his essay in which he laid out his legal arguments against OpenAI.^[8][21][6]

Even though San Francisco authorities initially described Balaji's death as suicide, the circumstances and the lack of detailed information at first led to widespread speculation and conspiracy theories. Many online commentators claimed that Balaji might have been killed to stop him from testifying against OpenAI.^[22]

Before the official autopsy was released in February, Balaji's parents publicly questioned the initial conclusion that he had killed himself. They began a public campaign to challenge what they saw as an incorrect ruling from San Francisco authorities. They said that he had been "cheerful" about two weeks before his death and pointed to the lack of a suicide note and what they described as "blood spatter anomalies" in his apartment.^[22][20] In December 2024, his parents announced that they had hired private investigators and ordered a second autopsy. They claimed that this autopsy suggested homicide, saying that Balaji was shot "in the back of the head from an angle at which he could not have shot himself." They did not release a copy of the report, and their lawyer said he "would not characterize it as conclusively proving murder".^[20] The official autopsy by the OCME described the bullet path as going from front to back and downward.^[18]

Claims of foul play increased in visibility after Elon Musk (who has had public disputes with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman) replied to a social media post by Balaji's mother and wrote that the death "doesn't seem like a suicide." In January, Tucker Carlson discussed Balaji's death with his mother on his podcast. That same day, Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna called for a "full and transparent investigation" into the case. San Francisco Supervisor Jackie Fielder also said she was "concerned" about the circumstances of Balaji's death.^[20]

Fortune magazine described the parents' actions as part of a sincere attempt to understand what had happened to their only child. The magazine spoke with several of Balaji's friends, who shared the parents' confusion and grief. It quoted Daren Firestone, an "attorney who works regularly with whistleblowers," who said that whistleblowers can feel lonely and doubtful, face "enormous pressure," and may feel that the "world is against [them]." Fortune also pointed out that "Balaji wasn’t divulging any previously unknown inside information about the company" and, comparing the situation to the John Barnett case, said that the parents' campaign had helped drive more online speculation.^[10]

As of April 2025, the official conclusion of the San Francisco Police Department and the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is that Balaji died by suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.^[20]

• Official website
• When does generative AI qualify for fair use? (Balaji's original essay alleging copyright violations, dated 23 October 2024)