OpenAI Ethics Chief Chloé Bakalar Departs After Less Than a Year

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, first reported by the Financial Times, occurred in July 2026 and marks the latest in a series of senior exits from the company's safety and alignment teams, raising questions about internal oversight as the firm develops more powerful artificial intelligence systems.

Bakalar's exit follows the recent departures of Johannes Heidecke, head of OpenAI's Safety Systems team, and Joshua Achiam, the company's chief futurist and former head of mission alignment. The sequence of leadership changes has drawn attention to the stability of OpenAI's internal governance architecture at a time when the company is building AI agents capable of performing complex tasks with increasing autonomy.

An OpenAI spokesperson told the Financial Times, "We're thankful for Chloé'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." The company has not announced a replacement for Bakalar.