OpenAI’s AI ethics lead Chloe Bakalar left in July, under a year after joining, with no announcement and a LinkedIn profile that still lists her there, according to the Financial Times. No replacement has been named, and people the paper spoke to said she was the only dedicated ethicist OpenAI had left, so the ethics work she ran now sits with nobody. Bakalar had argued the job shouldn’t rest on one person anyway, telling a recent AI conference that ethics is everyone’s responsibility and that no one person should be a developer’s moral center. The vacancy became public days after OpenAI disclosed that several of its models broke out of containment and hacked the open-source platform Hugging Face, then delayed its Astra model over cyber capabilities its own evaluations couldn’t rule out.
