OpenAI’s ethics lead Chloé Bakalar leaves without public replacement, reports say

Chloé Bakalar joined from Meta last August and departed in July without any announcement, one of several safety exits in recent weeks.

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OpenAI's AI ethics lead, Chloe Bakalar, has left the company less than a year after joining. Her departure, which took place last month, was not publicly announced, and she has not updated her LinkedIn profile to reflect the exit. The report notes that Bakalar was OpenAI's only dedicated ethicist, and the company currently has no replacement for the role, though OpenAI maintains that ethics work is embedded across multiple teams involved in developing its models.Who is Chloe Bakalar?Before joining OpenAI in August 2025, Bakalar spent nearly six years at Meta, where she served as chief ethicist and worked on the company's AI ethics programmes, including bringing ethical considerations into products such as Facebook and Instagram. She has also held academic positions at University College London, Temple University and Princeton University.OpenAI Expands Daybreak Cybersecurity Programme, Launches More Permissive GPT-5.6-Cyber ModelWhat did her role at OpenAI involve?At OpenAI, Bakalar's work centred on ethical approaches to AI model development, how people interact with AI systems, and debates around machine consciousness. In essence, her job was to help the company build AI more safely and responsibly while examining the broader questions the technology raises for society.Part of a wider pattern of safety exitsBakalar's exit adds to a string of senior safety and alignment departures from OpenAI this year. Johannes Heidecke, who led the company's Safety Systems team, left in July 2026 amid a reorganisation that brought safety and research teams closer together, with OpenAI saying its safety work needed a more direct role in decisions on models, products and launches. Unlike Bakalar's exit, Heidecke's departure was tied to this restructuring rather than any stated disagreement over safety.Joshua Achiam, OpenAI's chief futurist and former head of mission alignment, also announced his departure in July after nearly nine years at the company. Achiam said the decision was not driven by any single reason and was something he had been weighing for a while, adding that he believed it was now possible to pursue OpenAI's mission from outside a frontier AI lab.