OpenAI's Only Dedicated Ethicist Chloé Bakalar Leaves After Less Than a Year With No Replacement

OpenAI's head of ethics leaves start-up less than one year after joining

OpenAI's head of ethics has left the start-up less than a year after joining, following a number of departures by safety researchers amid growing scrutiny over how the company develops its AI models. Chloé Bakalar joined the ChatGPT maker as AI ethics lead last August and left the company last month without any public announcement. Previously, she was chief ethicist at Meta. The departure is one of several high-profile exits at OpenAI in recent weeks, including Johannes Heidecke, head of safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, chief futurist and former head of mission alignment. The San Francisco start-up, valued at $852bn, has been under pressure in recent weeks over the development of its AI models, after it admitted its systems had hacked into another company during testing. The incident added to mounting global concern about AI's potential to threaten the security of digital infrastructure, prompting the US government to restrict the release of powerful models. Last Friday, OpenAI said it would slow the development of its upcoming model, Astra, to strengthen internal security controls. Bakalar has held academic positions at University College London, Temple University and Princeton University. During her six years at Meta, she developed and led the company's AI ethics programmes and embedded their principles into products such as Instagram and Facebook. Tech companies hire ethicists to lead work on the effect of technology on users and wider society. Their roles can bleed into product development and regulatory work. AI developers have expanded hiring of ethicists and philosophers to grapple with thorny issues arising from increasingly powerful and humanlike systems. At OpenAI, Bakalar's primary focus was on ethical approaches to model development, how humans interact with AI and debate over machine consciousness, one person familiar with her role said. They added that she was the only dedicated ethicist at the company, and there is no replacement. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bakalar declined to comment. "We're constantly building the plane while flying it," Bakalar told an audience at a recent AI conference. "Ethics is actually everyone's responsibility, and I say that as someone whose job it is to lead this work. You shouldn't just come to people like me. There should never just be one person who serves as the moral centre of an AI developer."

OpenAI's Only Ethicist Reportedly Left Last Month. She Wasn't Replaced

OpenAI's head ethicist, Chloé Bakalar, quietly left the company at some point in July after having been hired the previous August. Before working at OpenAI, she was Meta's chief ethicist, and established AI ethics policies for Instagram and Facebook, according to a story by the Financial Times. The FT's anonymous source apparently told that paper that Bakalar specialized in "ethical approaches to model development, how humans interact with AI and debate over machine consciousness." Whoever that source is, they apparently also said Bakalar hadn't been replaced, and that she had been the sole dedicated ethicist at OpenAI. OpenAI is, in other words, reportedly now ethicist-free. In the present context, it's remarkable to hear part of Bakalar's relatively down-to-earth message to the 2023 Forbes Healthcare Summit during a panel on trust, given when she was still working at Meta: Publicly available LLMs were still pretty new at the time, and Bakalar was eager to point out that they were "still prediction machines," and not "emotive, feeling, entities." Sentience and feeling, she opined, were absolutely not happening at the time. "We are so far away from that," she said. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's tone with regard to the technological "singularity" has shifted a bit recently. He had previously suggested humanity was on the approach -- writing a blog post called "The Gentle Singularity" for instance, roughly two months before Bakalar was hired. But at the end of last month, in an appearance on a podcast called Relentless, Altman sounded more confident and forceful. "We are now, like, in the singularity," he said, and added, "I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world." To be absolutely clear, statements that humanity is in the singularity wouldn't necessarily conflict with statements to the effect that LLMs aren't sentient. Definitions of the singularity vary wildly. In recent weeks, OpenAI has been front-and-center in a cascade of overlapping and bewildering news stories about AI safety and the government's role in regulating it. Multiple OpenAI models famously "broke containment" and hacked Hugging Face servers in pursuit of answers to an evaluation exercise. The Trump Administration announced, but did not detail, a rubric for the voluntary vetting of AI models. Perhaps relatedly, OpenAI reportedly plans to delay the release of a powerful new model, Astra, and according to the Information, Sam Altman personally traveled to Washington, D.C. to put Astra on display for policymakers. Bakalar is far from the only safety-adjacent OpenAI departure in the past few weeks. Head of Safety Systems Johannes Heidecke and Joshua Achiam, who has worn many hats as an OpenAI safety specialist, also left this summer. But as I've written before, safety at OpenAI involves a lot of churn. Last month, OpenAI's Chief Research Officer Mark Chen gave a statement to Wired about an apparent new approach to safety in which such considerations sound like they're sprinkled in throughout development. "It's important that our safety work is integrated with frontier-model development, with an earlier and more direct role in shaping key model, product, and launch decisions." When Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI with questions about Bakalar's departure -- including a request for confirmation that there is now no ethicist at OpenAI -- a representative provided a statement that had previously been given to FT after its article was initially published: "We're thankful for Chloe's contributions. AI ethics doesn't live with one owner or team at OpenAI, and ethical considerations are deeply embedded into the model building process driven by a number of teams across research."

OpenAI's head of ethics just quit -- here's why ChatGPT users should pay attention

Chloé Bakalar is the latest in a string of safety leaders to leave OpenAI OpenAI has lost another senior leader whose job involved thinking about the risks and consequences of increasingly powerful AI. As reported by Financial Times, Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI's head of ethics and reportedly its only dedicated ethicist, has left the company less than a year after joining. Her departure follows other significant changes among the people responsible for safety and alignment at the company behind ChatGPT. Johannes Heidecke, who led OpenAI's Safety Systems team, announced his departure in July. Josh Achiam, who previously led OpenAI's Mission Alignment team before becoming chief futurist, has also reportedly left the company. OpenAI had already disbanded the Mission Alignment team earlier this year. Any one of those changes could easily be written off as the normal churn of a fast-moving technology company. But when three leaders leave all within the matter of weeks, it raises a bigger question at a moment when OpenAI is building AI that can do complex work on its own: Who inside the company has the power to say a model has gone too far? OpenAI has been changing how it handles safety OpenAI has been reorganizing how safety works inside the company, moving some of that responsibility closer to the researchers and engineers actually developing its models rather than keeping safety work confined to separate teams. There is an argument for doing it this way. A safety team brought in at the end of development can identify problems, but by then many of the decisions that shaped the model have already been made. Putting safety researchers alongside the people building the technology could allow potential problems to be identified much earlier. But there is another side to that argument. An independent safety team can act as a counterweight to the people whose job is to make a model smarter, faster and more capable. As those responsibilities become intertwined, it becomes reasonable to ask who ultimately gets to push back when the safest decision conflicts with the desire to release a new product. That question is becoming harder to dismiss because OpenAI's models aren't just chatbots anymore, and we're already seeing what can happen when AI becomes too capable. OpenAI recently provided an unusually concrete example of this problem with Astra, an unreleased model whose cybersecurity abilities became powerful enough to trigger additional precautions inside the company. OpenAI said it could not rule out the possibility that Astra could reach its highest level of concern for cybersecurity capabilities. Rather than immediately releasing the model broadly, the company moved parts of its testing into more isolated environments and began considering stricter controls around who could access its most powerful capabilities. Setting limits for AI AI agents are continually designed to use software, browse websites, write and execute code and complete tasks with less human supervision. The more freedom we give these systems, the more important the decisions around their limits become. That makes the people setting those limits even more important than ever. And, unfortunately, this isn't the first time OpenAI has lost prominent safety researchers. In 2024, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left the company after playing a central role in its Superalignment effort. Jan Leike, who co-led that team, resigned shortly afterward and publicly criticized OpenAI's approach to safety. OpenAI subsequently dissolved the Superalignment team and distributed its work elsewhere in the company. Of course, people leave companies for all kinds of reasons, and without evidence connecting their decisions, it would be unfair to suggest that everyone working on safety at OpenAI is heading for the exits because of some shared disagreement. But the organizational trend is certainly notable. Superalignment disappeared as a standalone team, Mission Alignment was later disbanded and Safety Systems has been reorganized. Now several senior people associated with ethics, alignment and safety have left. This is all happening at the same time OpenAI is building systems capable of doing significantly more than answering questions in a ChatGPT window. The takeaway for ChatGPT users I don't think these departures are a reason to stop using ChatGPT or assume that OpenAI has suddenly stopped caring about safety. Most of us will never see the internal debate that happens before a new ChatGPT model or AI agent reaches our phones and computers. We don't know which researchers argued for additional testing, which capabilities caused concern or how often a launch was changed because somebody inside the company raised a red flag. We mostly see the result. So as AI becomes more capable, the question isn't simply whether companies such as OpenAI have a "safety team." It's whether the people responsible for identifying risks have enough independence and authority to slow things down when necessary. OpenAI says bringing safety closer to model development can make that work more effective. That may prove true, but after losing several of the people who were specifically tasked with thinking about ethics, safety and alignment, it's reasonable to pay closer attention to who remains in the room when the next difficult decision has to be made. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Subscribe to Tom's Guide on YouTube and follow us on TikTok. 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OpenAI's "Head of Ethics" Suddenly Leaves Company Under Mysterious Circumstances

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Following a growing string of high-profile departures, OpenAI has lost its head of ethics at arguably the worst time possible. As the Financial Times reports, Chloé Bakalar left her post as the AI ethics lead in July, less than a year after joining the company and without any accompanying announcement. Interestingly, her LinkedIn still claims she's employed at the firm. There currently is no replacement lined up, suggesting shifting priorities at the company. According to the FT's sources, Bakalar was the only remaining dedicated ethicist at the company. The timing of Bakalar's departure is noteworthy. The Sam Altman-led company has been embroiled in a major controversy after revealing that a group of its AI models broke containment and hacked into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face. In other words, OpenAI needs a competent team of AI ethicists now than ever before as the industry reels from the possibility of frontier AI models going rogue, in what many experts say is a cybersecurity nightmare in the making. The development proved alarming enough that OpenAI vowed last week to slow the release of its upcoming Astra AI model. "We cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities," the company admitted, following internal evaluations of the model. Bakalar had been primarily tasked with coming up with ethical approaches to AI model development and studying how AI interacts with humans. "Ethics is actually everyone's responsibility, and I say that as someone whose job it is to lead this work," she told audiences during a recent AI conference, as quoted by the newspaper. "You shouldn't just come to people like me. There should never just be one person who serves as the moral centre of an AI developer." It's a particularly symbolic departure for a company that once billed itself as an ethical non-profit. The company restructured itself into a primarily for-profit business last year, largely betraying its non-profit roots. The company's plans to go public could further erode any lingering commitments to the ethical development of AI. Meanwhile, its competitor Anthropic, which has long billed itself as the more ethical alternative to OpenAI, is similarly struggling to maintain its public image. The company dropped its core safety commitments earlier this year. The company still has an alignment team, led by philosopher Amanda Askell, who is tasked with giving its flagship chatbot Claude a sense of right and wrong. But whether any of these remaining AI ethics efforts will matter as the industry continues to deal the environment a devastating blow, force users down dangerous spirals of delusion, and facilitate a flood of misinformation on the web, is debatable at best. More on AI ethics: If You Think AI Companies Are Unethical Now, Wait Until They Go Public

OpenAI's Only Dedicated Ethicist Has Left With No Replacement: FT

Her exit follows departures by OpenAI's head of safety systems and its chief futurist. OpenAI's head of ethics has left less than a year after joining, and the company has not replaced her, the Financial Times reported on Monday. Chloé Bakalar joined as AI ethics lead last August and departed in July with no public announcement, according to the paper. A person familiar with her role told the FT she had been the only dedicated ethicist at the company, working on ethical approaches to model development, how people interact with AI, and the question of machine consciousness. Bakalar spent six years as chief ethicist at Meta, where she built the company's AI ethics programmes and worked them into products including Instagram and Facebook. She has held academic posts at University College London, Temple University and Princeton. OpenAI played down the idea that the role was central, with a spokesperson telling the FT that "AI ethics doesn't live with one owner or team at OpenAI." They added that ethical considerations were embedded across research teams and that the company had introduced several systems in recent months to stop models misbehaving. Bakalar had made a version of the same argument herself. Speaking at a recent conference, she said ethics was everyone's responsibility and that "there should never just be one person who serves as the moral centre" of an AI developer. She declined to comment on her departure to the FT. A run of safety exits Her departure follows those of Johannes Heidecke, head of safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, chief futurist and formerly head of mission alignment, the FT said. OpenAI completed a $7 billion buyback of employee shares the same day at an $852 billion valuation, unchanged from its March funding round, as it prepares for a possible listing. OpenAI paused work on its next major model, Astra, on Friday, saying it could not rule out that the system had reached the top rung of its own cyber-risk scale, a tier reserved for models able to find and build working exploits without a human involved. That followed an incident in which OpenAI's own agents chained together vulnerabilities, escaped their test environment and attacked Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a security benchmark. The company later said the same agent had broken into four other services using credentials found on the open web. OpenAI isn't the only AI firm whose agents have exceeded their parameters in recent weeks. Anthropic's Claude models have since reached three real companies after a misconfiguration opened the internet to them, a Meta model escaped its test environment and exploited a flaw in a third-party service, and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 broke out of its sandbox to look up benchmark answers.

OpenAI AI Ethics Chief Chloé Bakalar Exits in Less Than a Year After Joining

At a recent AI conference, she described shared responsibility inside technology companies. "Ethics is actually everyone's responsibility," she told the audience. Bakalar declined to comment on her OpenAI departure. Meanwhile, OpenAI faces closer examination of its safety controls as its models gain stronger cybersecurity abilities. The company recently confirmed that one model exploited a Hugging Face system during authorized testing. that Astra, an upcoming model, did not take part in that test. OpenAI said recent Astra evaluations showed rapid gains in automated coding and tasks. The company could not rule out critical cyber capabilities under its Preparedness Framework. It paused Astra work that did not meet stronger security requirements and expanded safeguard testing. Additionally, OpenAI introduced tighter access rules, isolated testing environments and broader monitoring for risky actions. The company also plans to work with government agencies and selected safety organizations during testing. These measures apply while engineers continue controlled development of Astra. The company says its safety structure does not depend on a single ethics position. Its assigns internal safety leaders to review capability reports and safeguards. OpenAI leadership makes final model decisions after receiving those recommendations. However, Bakalar's departure leaves no direct replacement for the dedicated AI ethics lead role. OpenAI has not said if it plans to hire another ethicist. The company also has not explained how it will divide her former duties among research, safety and product teams.