OpenAI's only dedicated ethicist has left and has not been replaced, FT reports
OpenAI’s AI ethics lead is gone, and according to the Financial Times she was the only dedicated ethicist the company had.
A quiet exit after less than a year
Chloé Bakalar joined OpenAI in August 2025 as head of ethics and left in July 2026. There was no public announcement, and the FT reports she has not been replaced.
Her portfolio covered ethical approaches to model development, how people interact with AI systems, and questions around machine consciousness. Before OpenAI she spent six years as chief ethicist at Meta, where she built the AI ethics program and pushed it into Instagram and Facebook. This was not a junior hire drifting away; it was the person who had done this job at scale before.
She is also not the only departure. Johannes Heidecke, who led safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, previously head of mission alignment, both left this summer.
OpenAI’s response, and how to read it
OpenAI gave the same statement to the FT and Gizmodo: “AI ethics doesn’t live with one owner or team at OpenAI, and ethical considerations are deeply embedded into the model building process.”
That is either genuinely reassuring or exactly what a company says when nobody owns the function. Distributed responsibility can mean everyone carries it, or it can mean no one does, and from the outside the two are indistinguishable until something goes wrong. The fact that the role sat empty for a month before anyone outside the company noticed leans toward the second reading.
Why the timing sharpens the question
The report lands in a week when OpenAI’s safety posture is already under scrutiny. The company released a dedicated cybersecurity model for approved defenders the same week, days after it detailed two incidents that occurred during external cyber evaluations.
That combination is the story. OpenAI is shipping more security-sensitive capability while the people whose full-time job was to think about ethics and safety have been leaving, and at least one of those seats has not been refilled. Whether embedded ethics can substitute for a named owner is now a live experiment, running at the most-watched AI company in the world.
Sources
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