Industry 2026-08-12

OpenAI's only ethicist left in July. It was not announced, and nobody has taken the job.

The Financial Times reported on 11 August that Chloé Bakalar, hired as OpenAI's AI ethics lead in August 2025, left the company in July 2026 — less than a year in. OpenAI made no announcement, and the role has not been filled. Bakalar came from Meta, where she had been chief ethicist from November 2021, and her brief at OpenAI covered ethical approaches to model development, how people and models interact, and the arguments around machine consciousness. Asked about the departure, an OpenAI spokesperson said AI ethics does not belong to a single individual or team and that ethical questions are embedded across the research groups that build the models. The exit follows two others from the safety side of the company this year: Johannes Heidecke, who led the Safety Systems team, and Joshua Achiam, its chief futurist.

Why it matters"Ethics belongs to everyone" is either a genuine organisational choice or the sentence you reach for when nobody owns it any more. The distinction shows up in what happens when a product decision and a safety objection collide — a dedicated post gives someone standing to lose that argument in public, and no post means the argument happens without a name attached to it. This lands in the same fortnight that OpenAI shipped a model deliberately trained to answer hacking questions it used to refuse, and while the company courts investors ahead of a possible listing. Nobody outside can say whether those things are connected. But an unfilled ethics chair at the largest consumer AI company is a fact worth keeping in view.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

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2026-08-20

OpenAI's only ethicist left in July. It was not announced, and nobody has taken the job.

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