OpenAI loses its head of ethics amid wave of executive departures

Chloé Bakalar, who led artificial intelligence ethics at OpenAI, has left the company after less than a year in the role. Her departure is not an isolated case: it adds to a string of exits at the company's highest levels, which in recent weeks has lost its heads of product, safety, marketing, science and operations — just as OpenAI prepares for a possible initial public offering.

Who Chloé Bakalar was and what she did at OpenAI

Bakalar joined OpenAI in 2025 from Meta, where she had held the role of head of ethics. At OpenAI, her job was to push approaches for the responsible development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems. She also researched issues around human interaction with AI systems, as well as questions about the eventual consciousness of machines, a field still in its early stages but increasingly discussed within the industry. Her exit leaves, at least temporarily, a gap in the role meant to set the ethical direction of one of the most influential companies in tech.

A list of departures that keeps growing

Bakalar's case became known just one day after Denise Dresser, OpenAI's chief revenue officer, announced she would leave the company. Dresser had joined in December, after serving as CEO of Slack, and shared her departure in an internal note posted on LinkedIn, saying she would leave in the “coming weeks” to “pursue other opportunities.” Her replacement will be Dali Rajic, currently president and chief operating officer of cybersecurity firm Wiz.

Dresser's exit came just two days after Brad Lightcap, head of special projects and OpenAI's former chief operating officer, also announced his departure. In fact, Dresser had absorbed part of Lightcap's responsibilities when he moved into special projects. Also joining the list are former head of AGI Fidji Simo and former chief marketing officer Kate Rouch, who also left their positions recently. Taken together, the exits of Bakalar, Dresser, Lightcap, Simo and Rouch draw an executive exodus that is unusual even for an industry accustomed to high leadership turnover.

In announcing the change at the top of its revenue function, OpenAI tried to frame the moves as part of a transition to a new stage for the company: “We're at an inflection point: the next generation of models will change not only how work gets done, but how companies are built and run,” the company said, explaining that Rajic “will build the revenue operating system needed to scale into this next phase.”

The IPO in the background

The resignations come as OpenAI moves toward a possible initial public offering. The company confirmed in June that it had confidentially filed S-1 paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the first formal step toward a stock market listing. Dresser's departure, in particular, comes just before that process, at a time when the stability of the leadership team tends to be watched closely by investors, regulators and business partners.

For businesses and professionals who rely on ChatGPT or the OpenAI API in their daily operations — from customer service to software development to content generation — this wave of departures does not immediately change how the products they already use function. But it is a signal worth watching. The resignation of the executive who led AI ethics, just as the company nears its IPO, raises questions about the continuity of the responsible-development policies OpenAI has publicly promoted, at a time when the company is also reorganizing its commercial and product divisions. None of these moves, on its own, implies an immediate risk to services already under contract, but together they reinforce the case for organizations that build critical processes on OpenAI's tools to keep contingency plans in place, avoid relying on a single AI provider, and closely track how the company's internal governance evolves in the months leading up to the public offering.