Why OpenAI’s Head of Ethics Chloé Bakalar Departed

Chloe Bakalar, former Head of Ethics at OpenAI. Credit: CITP Princeton/YouTube

OpenAI’s Ethics Head Chloé Bakalar has left the leading AI amid a tumultuous period for AI safety – following the OpenAI hacking incident

OpenAI’s Head of EthicsChloé Bakalarhas left the company. The departure was first reported by the Financial Times and happened last month, less than a year after she joined the Californian AI firm.

In recent times, Johannes Heidecke, Head of OpenAI's Safety Systems team, also left the company – as did OpenAI’s Chief Futurist Joshua Achiam.

According to Business Insider, OpenAI has reorganised its safety, product and research teams numerous times since ChatGPT launched in 2022, after which the company grew rapidly from a small research lab into a massive tech company.

“The people at the forefront of it had no idea it was going to blow up the way it did,” Chloé told IE Insights, a social media channel of the Spanish IE University, in March.

"Everybody needs to be part of the conversations; it shouldn’t simply be one person who has a multi-billion-dollar company that gets to dictate that this is what’s right for all people, especially when we are talking about global technologies that are operating all over the world, impacting billions of people."

Chloé Bakalar departs OpenAI

At OpenAI, Chloé’s primary focus was on ethical approaches to model development, how humans interact with AI and debate over machine consciousness, said one person familiar with her role who spoke with the FT.

The person told the newspaper that she was the only dedicated ethicist at the company and there is no replacement.

“We’re thankful for Chloé’s contributions,” an OpenAI spokesperson told the FT. “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."

Before her role at OpenAI, which she started last August, she was the Chief Ethicist at Meta from November 2021 to August 2025.

Chloé also currently serves as an Advisory Council Member at the Princeton Center for Technology Policy and as a Senior Research Associate at University College London.

She has held a variety of academic positions at Temple University, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania – where she completed her PhD in Political Science and Government. Her Dissertation was titled “Small Talk: The Socialities of Speech in Liberal Democratic Life.”

The kinds of questions that AI ethics brings up, are the same kinds of questions that people have been asking for centuries

Chloé Bakalar, former AI Ethics Lead at OpenAI

I think, therefore I’m hired

Chloé's appointment at OpenAI followed a trend of some of the world’s biggest AI labs hiring philosophers from academia to think through the potential ramifications of the technology.

A June article from The Economist highlights that many in philosophy departments, from students to professors, are being snapped up by AI firms. Students get job offers before they have graduated, Luciano Floridi, a philosopher at Yale University, told the weekly.

It may seem odd for these developer and coding-heavy firms to be hiring philosophers, but as Chloé points out: "The kinds of questions that AI ethics brings up, are the same kinds of questions that people have been asking for centuries," she told IE Insights.

"What does it mean to be a human? What does it mean to have responsibilities to others? What kinds of responsibilities do we have for the things that we create?"

OpenAI’s Head of Ethics, Chloé Bakalar. Credit: Chloé Bakalar/LinkedIn

Ethical and safety concerns from frontier models

Numerous safety and ethical concerns stem from the rapid development of advanced AI models. The Alan Turing Institute has argued that the prospect that progress in AI can help governments to confront some of its most urgent challenges is exciting – but legitimate worries abound.

It highlights that the steep learning curve means that mistakes and miscalculations will be made and that both unanticipated and harmful impacts will occur.

This is particularly prescient after AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and now Moonshot escaped training environments in recent weeks.

One of the ways some AI firms deal with issues of model misalignment is by having a constitution. US AI firm Anthropic highlights in its constitution: "Our central aspiration is for Claude to be a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent. That is, to a first approximation, we want Claude to do what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do in Claude’s position."

The Economist notes that constitutions for Anthropic’s Claude models have incorporated material from sources as diverse as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Apple’s terms of service and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.