A selection of articles, op-eds, TV segments, and other media featuring Ethics Center staff and programs.
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AI developer Anthropic is in a major dispute with the U.S. government over the ethical and moral dimensions of AI development.
“You can imagine an alternate universe where Dario Amodei just said, ‘Okay, we’ll sign it. It’s no big deal.’ They would be doing fine as a business, and the rest of the world would not be talking about AI ethics right now. [But] this universe that we’re living in is one that has been fundamentally changed in a lot of ways because somebody decided to take an ethical stand. I think that’s important,” Green said.
Brian Green, director, technology ethics, quoted by the National Catholic Register.
n February, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan launched two new social media accounts on X and Instagram, each one designated as a city-backed account for official messaging amid City Hall complaints about the mayor’s longstanding practice of using his individual social media accounts for both city business and to promote his own personal brand.
With Mahan's personal channels turning their focus to promoting his gubernatorial campaign, these complaints have increased
“If staff time was used to build or manage the account in an official capacity, the cleaner and more defensible standard would be to create an entirely separate campaign site,” Hurt told San José Spotlight. “That includes not carrying over followers that may have been accumulated through publicly funded work," says Davina Hurt, Ethics Center director of government ethics.
Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, quoted by San José Spotlight.
Anthropic Public Benefit Corporation, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, has been designated a "supply chain risk to national security" by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as the company is refusing to allow the government to use their system for creating and operating autonomous weapons as well as for mass surveillance of Americans.
Ann Skeet, senior director, leadership ethics, said Anthropic claims Claude has a built-in directive to make ethical decisions.
"I think what [they're] saying is that the models are not capable enough right now to support those uses safely, particularly the autonomous weapons. I think that's what the company is trying to say: can we just slow down and make sure we're doing the right thing here?" Skeet said.
Ann Skeet, senior director, leadership ethics, quoted by KTVU Fox 2.
The Press-Enterprise reports Hemet’s city council will grant a third public hearing for a controversial warehouse project that councilmembers rejected twice before.
What’s going on in Hemet “illustrates the tension in local democratic governance where we elect people because of their convictions and ideas and then we ask them to act like impartial judges,” said Davina Hurt, Ethics Center director, government ethics.
“The fact that they’re going to a third hearing, the fact that there are recusals — This is for the benefit of the public and it is probably a good thing, although I’m sure if it doesn’t turn out the way the applicants want there may be a continued conversation.”
Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, quoted by The Press-Enterprise.
A San Francisco-based robotics company says the Trump administration has expressed interest in deploying its high-tech robots onto future battlefields reports Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban from NBC Bay Area.
“I think when we get to arming robots, we get into a much more complex moral area,” said David DeCosse, director, religious and Catholic ethics, who has been researching the ethics of war for the past 30 years.
“Who is responsible for making decisions in which human life is involved?” said DeCosse, who warned that delegating life-and-death decisions to machines risks blurring accountability in combat. “If it's a robot, even a programmed robot, I think that responsibility gets diminished in a problematic way.”
“We have gotten as far as we have in this country by being smart about our defense and also being moral about it,” DeCosse said. “A race to the bottom with these things is not a race that I think as Americans we want to pursue.”
David DeCosse, director, religious and Catholic ethics, quoted by NBC Bay Area.
Grok generated three million sexualized images in just 11 days after its image-editing feature was released. Google and Apple allowed dozens of “nudification” apps in their app stores, but now say they’ve removed some undressing apps, reports The Mercury News.
For companies like xAI, Google and Apple, the availability of undressing apps represents a leadership failure, said Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics.
Reputational hits like the ones they’re taking now erode value in the company,” Skeet said. “They’re actually doing harm to the very entity that they’re responsible for leading.”
Ann Skeet, senior director, leadership ethics, quoted by The Mercury News.
The Oakland finance department has plans to take over parking enforcement from Oakland Department of Transportation (OakDOT). Officials presented their plan at a city council committee meeting on Tuesday.
During the meeting, Michael Ford, who served as parking director until recently, made claims that over the last 10 years, he was periodically approached by “people in power” in Oakland who asked him to fix their parking citations or obtain other parking privileges. Ford says he turned down these requests.
Davina Hurt, director of government ethics, said she found Ford’s claim “shocking.” If his allegations are true, she said, it could mean that an “abuse of a public office for personal benefit” was going on for years.
“ To ask someone to change a parking violation,” Hurt said, “truly undermines equal treatment under the law, that concept that we all share, and it could also demonstrate a broader culture of entitlement and abuse” in the city, she said.
Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, quoted by The Oaklandside.
"Trump’s direct financial ties to Tahnoon are the latest in a growing pattern of conflicts of interest that national security experts and ethics watchdogs worry could mean the president is prioritizing his own financial interests over the public’s," reports The Dispatch.
But as Davina Hurt, director, government ethics points out, conflicts of interest do not require proof of corruption to erode public confidence. “Legality is the floor, and ethics is the ceiling,” says Hurt.
Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, quoted by The Dispatch.
