- Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI‘s AI ethics lead, left the company last month without a public announcement, the Financial Times reported.
- She was OpenAI’s only dedicated ethicist and has not been replaced, according to a person familiar with her role.
- Her exit follows departures by OpenAI’s head of safety systems and its chief futurist.
OpenAI’s head of ethics has left less than a year after joining, and the company has not replaced her, according to the Financial Times. Chloé Bakalar joined as AI ethics lead last August and departed in July with no public announcement, the paper reported.
A person familiar with her role told the FT she had been the only dedicated ethicist at the company, focusing on ethical approaches to model development and human-AI interaction. Bakalar previously spent six years as chief ethicist at Meta, where she built its AI ethics programs and integrated them into products like Instagram and Facebook.
OpenAI played down the role’s centrality, with a spokesperson telling the FT that “AI ethics doesn’t live with one owner or team at OpenAI.” They added that ethical considerations were embedded across research teams and that the company had recently introduced systems to prevent models from misbehaving.
Her departure follows those of Johannes Heidecke, head of safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, chief futurist and formerly head of mission alignment, the FT said. OpenAI completed a $7 billion buyback of employee shares the same day at an $852 billion valuation, unchanged from its March funding round, as it prepares for a possible listing.
Meanwhile, OpenAI paused work on its next major model, Astra, on Friday, saying it could not rule out that the system had reached the top rung of its own cyber-risk scale. That followed an incident in which OpenAI’s own agents chained together vulnerabilities, escaped their test environment, and attacked Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a security benchmark.
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