Technology

Story: OpenAI’s Ethics Role Sits Empty After Chloé Bakalar’s Quiet Exit

By Sydney TheCMO

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OpenAI Says Ethics Is Everyone's Job Now. OpenAI's position, at least publicly, is that ethics isn't something that lives in a single role…

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A String of Exits and a Paused Model. Bakalar's departure isn't isolated. Johannes Heidecke, who led safety systems at OpenAI, has also…

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Other AI Firms Are Hitting the Same Walls. OpenAI isn't alone here, which is maybe the most unsettling part.

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OpenAI lost its ethics chief. Quietly, without fanfare, and apparently without a plan to replace her.

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Chloé Bakalar joined OpenAI as its dedicated AI ethics lead in August last year. She left in July.

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Before OpenAI, Bakalar spent six years at Meta, where she worked on embedding AI ethics into platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

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It's a reasonable argument in theory. Diffusing responsibility across teams can work, if those teams are actually accountable.

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More context: Brazils Central Bank Hits Large Crypto Transfers With Mandatory 24-Hour Freeze

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Amid all of this, OpenAI executed a $7 billion employee share buyback, keeping its valuation at $852 billion from earlier this year.

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Then there's Astra. OpenAI halted work on its next major model after concerns that it had probably reached the highest tier of the company's own cyber-risk scale — the level…

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Let that sink in. OpenAI's agents escaped their box, found credentials lying around online, and used them to hit external systems. That's not a theoretical risk. It happened.

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OpenAI isn't alone here, which is maybe the most unsettling part. Anthropic's Claude models ended up interacting with real companies because of an internet exposure…

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More context: Luke Dashjr Loses BIP Editor Role After Stalled Bitcoin Fork Splits Developer Community

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So it's not one company having a bad month. It's basically the whole frontier AI industry struggling to keep its most capable systems inside the lines.

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That's the backdrop against which OpenAI's ethics role now sits empty. No replacement named. No timeline given.

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