This doesn't seem like suicide': Elon Musk on OpenAI whistleblower's death

Elon Musk has raised questions over the death of SuchirBalaji, a 26-year-old former OpenAIresearcher. The late Balaji, found dead in his San Francisco apartment, had accused OpenAI of copyright violations prior to his death. Although authorities have ruled it a suicide, Balaji's mother, Poornima Rao, has demanded a fuller investigation, claiming foul play.

In response to a post by Poornima Rao on X (formerly Twitter), Musk wrote, "This doesn't seem like a suicide." Rao called her son's death a "cold-blooded murder" in the guise of a suicide. The family also had a private autopsy, Rao noted, which the post reportedly said contradicted the official police report. Frustrated with the investigation by the San Francisco Police Department, she asked the FBI to become involved.

SuchirBalaji had worked at OpenAI for almost four years, working on ChatGPT for the last year and a half of that time. Balaji had previously raised specific issues around copyright infringement in AI tools such as ChatGPT before his death. Balaji expressed scepticism in an October 24 post over the "fair use" defence commonly invoked by generative AI firms in which a competing substitute able to generate copies of the original corpus on which it was trained is built by a tool based on "fair use."

"I didn't know a lot about copyright or fair use at first, but the lawsuits against generative AI companies piqued my interest. After doing some research, my conclusion was that fair use was a very unlikely defense against most AI products," Balaji had written.

The San Francisco Police Department reports there is no evidence of foul play, but Rao has sworn to seek justice. "We have hired a private investigator and we had a second autopsy done, which does not support what the police are saying. There are signs of a struggle and bloodstains in the bathroom," she wrote.

While Balaji's tragic death prompts new questions, Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and a co-founder of OpenAI, is among a growing number of people calling for more inquiry.