SAN FRANCISCO — Suchir Balaji, the 26-year-old former OpenAI researcher who in October publicly accused the company of violating copyright law, was found dead in his Lower Haight apartment on Nov. 26, authorities confirmed this week.

The San Francisco Police Department said officers responded to a well-being check at about 1 p.m. and found Balaji deceased. The medical examiner’s office determined the manner of death to be suicide; police stated there is currently “no evidence of foul play.” Balaji’s mother has requested privacy.

Balaji joined OpenAI as a researcher after attending UC Berkeley to study computer science, initially believing AI could help solve major problems, including curing diseases and stopping aging. Two years after joining OpenAI as a researcher, his outlook began to sour in 2022. He grew particularly concerned as he gathered data from the internet for the company’s GPT-4 program, arguing in an analysis on his personal website that “No known factors seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data.” The New York Times, in a Nov. 18 court filing, had named Balaji as someone holding “unique and relevant documents” for its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.

On Hacker News, where the story climbed to over 1,000 points, commenters remembered Balaji as a brilliant engineer and described him as brave for standing up to the company. But others speculated about the timing of his death, with one commenter comparing it to the Boeing whistleblower case and suggesting OpenAI may have driven Balaji into “financial and emotional desperation.” For now, the official cause stands as suicide, and information he held was expected to play a key part in the lawsuits against OpenAI.