OpenAI will soon be without a head of AI ethics. Chloé Bakalar left the company in July, according to the Financial Times, less than a year after joining. OpenAI has confirmed her departure.
According to an insider, Bakalar’s focus was on ethical issues in model development, human-AI interaction, and debates about potential machine consciousness. She was reportedly the only person in the company solely responsible for ethics. There is no successor.
OpenAI stated that ethical issues are not confined to a single person or team but are firmly integrated into the model development of several research teams. Furthermore, the company has introduced several safety systems in recent months designed to prevent misconduct by its models. This likely refers to the Hugging Face incident, which became known in July, where OpenAI models autonomously infiltrated the platform’s systems.
According to the newspaper, two other executives from areas related to AI safety and model alignment also left OpenAI in July. There is no indication of a common trigger so far. Bakalar also did not comment on the reasons for her departure.
Former OpenAI Robotics Head Moves to Anthropic
Another interesting personnel change: Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI in November 2024 and led robotics and consumer hardware there, has reportedly moved to competitor Anthropic, according to The Information.
Kalinowski had left OpenAI in March. She cited OpenAI’s negotiations with the US Department of Defense as the reason. In her view, key ethical questions regarding surveillance and the use of autonomous weapon systems were not sufficiently clarified. Anthropic had clearly positioned itself on these two points in its own dispute with the Pentagon.
The AI developer is currently intensifying its research at the intersection of AI and robotics, including investigating the control of robots and drones by AI models. However, what Kalinowski will specifically work on there is not yet known.
Kalinowski has many years of experience in hardware development. From 2007 to 2013, she worked at Apple on the design of various MacBook models. She then moved to Meta, where she held a leadership role in VR headsets such as Oculus Rift and Quest, and most recently on Meta’s AR headset Orion. At OpenAI, she was primarily involved in building and scaling the robotics organization.
(mki)
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This article was originally published in
German.
It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.
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