OpenAI's only dedicated ethicist exits after under a year — with no replacement

Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI’s head of ethics, has left the company less than a year after joining, according to the Financial Times. She arrived in August 2025 from Meta, where she had served as chief ethicist since 2021, and departed in July 2026. At OpenAI she worked on the ethics of model development, human-AI interaction, and questions around machine consciousness.

The detail that matters most: a person familiar with the role says Bakalar was OpenAI’s sole dedicated ethicist, and the company does not plan to fill the seat directly. That leaves ethics work distributed across other teams rather than owned by a single senior voice — a notable posture for a company whose products now shape how hundreds of millions of people interact with AI. Neither Bakalar nor OpenAI has given a public reason for the exit.

The departure fits a wider pattern of churn in OpenAI’s safety and research ranks. Safety Systems lead Johannes Heidecke and ‘chief futurist’ Joshua Achiam have also recently left. Coming amid rapid commercial expansion, the steady outflow of safety- and ethics-focused personnel raises questions about how much internal weight those functions carry as the company scales.