Microsoft Scraps Entire Ethical AI Team Amid AI Boom

Microsoft Scraps Entire Ethical AI Team Amid AI Boom

As part of the tech giant’s ongoing layoffs, the company has cut its Ethics and Society team, which had focused on aligning AI products with responsible policy.

Microsoft is currently in the process of shoehorning text-generating artificial intelligence into every single product that it can. And starting this month, the company will be continuing on its AI rampage without a team dedicated to internally ensuring those AI features meet Microsoft’s ethical standards, according to a Monday night report from Platformer.

Microsoft has scrapped its whole Ethics and Society team within the company’s AI sector, as part of ongoing layoffs set to impact 10,000 total employees, per Platformer. The company maintains its Office of Responsible AI, which creates the broad, Microsoft-wide principles to govern corporate AI decision making. But the ethics and society taskforce, which bridged the gap between policy and products, is reportedly no more.

Gizmodo reached out to Microsoft to confirm the news, but did not immediately hear back. In a statement to Platformer, the company wrote:

Microsoft is committed to developing AI products and experiences safely and responsibly…Over the past six years we have increased the number of people across our product teams within the Office of Responsible AI who, along with all of us at Microsoft, are accountable for ensuring we put our AI principles into practice…We appreciate the trailblazing work the ethics and society team did to help us on our ongoing responsible AI journey.