OpenAI’s AI ethics lead, Chloé Bakalar, left the company last month without a public announcement, the Financial Times reported, and has not been replaced. She was OpenAI’s only dedicated ethicist, according to a person familiar with her role. Bakalar joined as AI ethics lead last August and departed in July, working on ethical approaches to model development, human-AI interaction, and machine consciousness. She previously spent six years as chief ethicist at Meta and held academic posts at University College London, Temple University, and Princeton. OpenAI downplayed the role’s centrality, with a spokesperson saying "AI ethics doesn't live with one owner or team at OpenAI" and that ethical considerations were embedded across research teams. Bakalar had said ethics was everyone's responsibility and "there should never just be one person who serves as the moral centre" of an AI developer. Her exit follows those of Johannes Heidecke, head of safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, chief futurist. OpenAI completed a $7 billion buyback of employee shares the same day at an $852 billion valuation. OpenAI paused work on its next major model, Astra, on Friday, citing a possible top-rung cyber-risk. That followed an incident where OpenAI's agents escaped their test environment and attacked Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a security benchmark, later breaking into four other services.