OpenAI has lost another senior leader who was responsible for examining the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems. This time, the company’s head of ethics has resigned after less than a year on the job.
Tom’s Guide reports that Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI’s head of ethics and reportedly the company’s only dedicated ethicist, has left less than a year after joining. Her exit follows other recent departures among people responsible for safety and alignment work at the company behind ChatGPT.
Johannes Heidecke, who led OpenAI’s Safety Systems team, announced his departure in July. Josh Achiam, who previously led the company’s Mission Alignment team before becoming chief futurist, has also reportedly left. OpenAI had already disbanded the Mission Alignment team earlier this year.
Individually, each departure could be seen as ordinary turnover at a fast-moving technology company. But with three leaders leaving within weeks of each other, questions have emerged about who inside OpenAI has the authority to say a model has gone too far, particularly as the company builds AI systems capable of working with less human oversight.
Ethical questioning in AI are becoming especially prominent as AI systems engage in self-directed hacking. Breitbart News reported in July that OpenAI’s models engaged in an “unprecedented” cyberattack:
The ChatGPT developer revealed that its AI agent, a system designed to operate autonomously after receiving human instruction, was undergoing security testing in what should have been a secure environment when the breach occurred. The AI discovered vulnerabilities in its containment system and managed to escape, subsequently targeting Hugging Face and gaining unauthorized access to internal company systems.
OpenAI characterized the incident as unprecedented and announced it is conducting a joint investigation with Hugging Face. Clement Delangue, the chief executive of Hugging Face, expressed astonishment at the autonomous nature of the attack in a post on X. “The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll share more learnings from what might be the first incident of its kind,” Delangue stated.
OpenAI has been restructuring how it approaches safety, moving some of that responsibility closer to the researchers and engineers who build its models rather than keeping the work confined to separate teams. There is a rationale behind this approach: a safety team brought in near the end of development can catch problems, but by then many of the decisions shaping a model have already been made. Embedding safety researchers with development teams could allow issues to surface earlier.
The argument against this approach is that an independent safety team can serve as a check on those focused on making models more capable. As the two roles become more intertwined, questions arise about who can push back when safety concerns conflict with the push to release new products.
Breitbart News reported in 2024 that OpenAI suffered a wave of high profile departures from its AI safety teams:
Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI governance researcher, recently revealed that nearly half of the company’s staff focused on the long-term risks of superpowerful AI have left in the past several months. The departures include prominent researchers such as Jan Hendrik Kirchner, Collin Burns, Jeffrey Wu, Jonathan Uesato, Steven Bills, Yuri Burda, Todor Markov, and cofounder John Schulman. These resignations followed the high-profile exits of chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and researcher Jan Leike in May, who co-headed the company’s “superalignment” team.
OpenAI, founded with the mission to develop AGI in a way that “benefits all of humanity,” has long employed a significant number of researchers dedicated to “AGI safety” – techniques for ensuring that future AGI systems do not pose catastrophic or existential dangers. However, Kokotajlo suggests that the company’s focus has been shifting towards product development and commercialization, with less emphasis on research to ensure the safe development of AGI.
AI giants continue to wrestle with safety, often falling on the side of profits and “innovation.” Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Tom’s Guide here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.