OpenAI’s AI ethics chief Chloé Bakalar exits company after less than a year

San Francisco: OpenAI’s AI ethics lead Chloé Bakalar has left the company less than a year after joining, adding to questions around how the artificial intelligence company is structuring its ethics and safety oversight.

Bakalar joined OpenAI in August 2025 after spending six years as chief ethicist at Meta. Her departure was reported by the Financial Times and has not been accompanied by a public announcement from OpenAI.

At OpenAI, Bakalar worked on issues including ethical model development, human-AI interactions and questions around machine consciousness. She was reportedly the company’s only dedicated ethicist, making her departure notable as the industry grapples with the social and ethical implications of increasingly capable AI systems.

Bakalar’s departure comes amid a broader series of changes involving OpenAI’s safety and alignment teams.

Among those to have left the company are Johannes Heidecke, who headed safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, a former head of mission alignment who later served as chief futurist.

The exits have fuelled wider debate over whether the rapid commercialisation of AI is creating tensions with the industry’s earlier emphasis on safety research and alignment.

OpenAI has not announced a direct replacement for Bakalar. Instead, the company said ethical considerations are incorporated across multiple teams involved in research and model development.

An OpenAI spokesperson said AI ethics does not sit with a single owner or team and that ethical considerations are embedded in the model-building process across the company.

Bakalar’s departure is particularly notable because she had previously argued that responsibility for AI ethics should not rest with one individual.

The view that ethics should be distributed across an organisation is increasingly relevant as AI companies move from experimental models to products used by millions of people.

However, the absence of a dedicated successor raises questions about who has the authority to challenge product or research decisions when ethical or safety concerns emerge.

For OpenAI, the challenge is now to demonstrate that distributing responsibility for ethics across research and engineering teams can provide the same level of oversight as having a dedicated ethics function.

Bakalar’s exit therefore adds another chapter to the ongoing debate over how AI companies balance speed, commercial ambitions and the safeguards needed as their technology becomes more powerful.