OpenAI’s Head of Ethics, Chloé Bakalar, has left the company, a departure first reported by the Financial Times and occurring last month, less than a year after she joined the Californian AI firm. Recent departures also include Johannes Heidecke, Head of OpenAI's Safety Systems team, and 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. In March, Chloé told IE Insights that "the people at the forefront of it had no idea it was going to blow up the way it did" and that "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." At OpenAI, her primary focus was on ethical approaches to model development, human-AI interaction, and debate over machine consciousness, according to a person familiar with her role who spoke with the FT, adding she was the only dedicated ethicist with no replacement. An OpenAI spokesperson told the FT, "We’re thankful for Chloé’s contributions. AI ethics doesn’t live with one owner or team at OpenAI." Before starting at OpenAI last August, she was Chief Ethicist at Meta from November 2021 to August 2025