OpenAI’s ethics lead has left after less than a year

OpenAI’s AI ethics lead Chloé Bakalar has left the company less than a year after joining, according to Financial Times reporting carried by The Irish Times. Bakalar was previously Meta’s chief ethicist and joined OpenAI to work on ethical approaches to model development, human interaction with AI and questions such as machine consciousness.

The report says Bakalar was OpenAI’s only dedicated ethicist and that no replacement has been named. OpenAI told the FT that ethics does not live with one owner or team and that ethical considerations are embedded across research and model-building teams.

The departure matters because it lands alongside other senior safety-related exits, including Johannes Heidecke, head of safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, chief futurist and former head of mission alignment. At a time when frontier labs are under pressure over model security, autonomy and release controls, the shape of their internal safety and governance teams is itself part of the news.