Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer who raised concerns about the company’s AI training practices potentially violating copyright law, was reportedly being considered as a key witness in lawsuits against OpenAI before he was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26.that Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old former engineer at OpenAI, died on November 26, 2024 in what San Francisco police said.
It was this work that led Balaji to publicly question in October 2024 whether OpenAI’s practices of training its AI systems on people’s data and then competing with them in the marketplace may be illegal copyright infringement. He told the Associated Press he would “try to testify” in the strongest copyright cases against the company, including one brought by the New York Times in 2023.