Balaji, who left OpenAI in October 2023, accused OpenAI of training its AI models on copyrighted material scraped from the internet without authorization. He argued that this practice could lead to copyright infringement, even if generative models do not directly replicate the training data.

Suchir Balaji, the 26-year-old OpenAI researcher-turned-whistleblower, was found dead in an apartment in San Francisco, US last month. His death on November 26 was determined suicide by the San Francisco medical examiner's office.

Indian American individual Suchir Balaji, a former researcher at OpenAI, died by suicide in his apartment in San Franciso.