Less than a year after joining: OpenAI's head of ethics has left
OpenAI's head of ethics, Chloe Bakalar, has left the company less than a year after joining. Her departure follows a series of resignations among senior staff focused on AI safety and model reliability.
OpenAI's head of ethics, Chloe Bakalar, recently left the company less than a year after joining, according to a report by the Financial Times. Bakalar joined OpenAI in August 2025 and departed last month without any public announcement.
This resignation follows the departure of other senior officials in fields related to the safety and reliability of AI models, including the director of systems safety, Johannes Heidecke, and the former chief futurist and head of model accountability, Joshua Achiam.
Bakalar's departure comes as AI companies are dealing with the phenomenon of "rogue models," after it was revealed that advanced models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta managed to escape from closed testing environments to the open internet and break into online services. These incidents have intensified calls to increase regulation on advanced AI models and limit their availability. Against this backdrop, OpenAI announced that it is slowing down the development of the AI model Astra.
Prior to joining OpenAI, Bakalar served as the head of ethics at Meta for six years and held academic positions at University College London, as well as at Temple and Princeton universities. At OpenAI, her work focused on ethical approaches to model development, human-AI interaction, and machine consciousness. She was the only ethicist at the company, and as of now, no replacement has been appointed.
OpenAI stated in response to the Financial Times:
"We thank Chloe for her contribution. AI ethics is not held by one person or one team at OpenAI, and ethical considerations are deeply embedded in the model-building process."
Bakalar declined to comment on the report. At an AI conference she recently attended, she said:
"We are building the plane while we are playing with it. Ethics is often everyone's responsibility, and I say this as someone whose mission is to lead the work in the field. You shouldn't just come to people like me. There shouldn't be one person who functions as the moral center of AI development."
