OpenAI's Only Dedicated Ethicist Left in July and Has Not Been Replaced
Financial Times / Hacker News·high signal
The FT reported that Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI's head of ethics, departed in July 2026 after joining in August 2025 — under a year — and that OpenAI never announced it and has no plans to fill the role. Bakalar came from Meta, where she was Chief Ethicist from November 2021 to August 2025, and worked on model development ethics, human-AI interaction and machine consciousness. Her exit follows safety-systems lead Johannes Heidecke and chief futurist Joshua Achiam; the HN thread hit 479 points and 448 comments, the largest AI-governance discussion of the day.