Ethics of AIEthics of AI

Articles

Real-world case studies on AI governance failures, compliance risks, and what responsible AI looks like in practice. Each article maps to one of our seven certification pillars.

The A$440,000 hallucination: what the Deloitte refund tells us about AI in professional servicesEthical

The A$440,000 hallucination: what the Deloitte refund tells us about AI in professional services

Deloitte used a generative AI tool to help draft a A$440,000 report for the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. It returned with fabricated quotes, invented academic papers, and citations to paragraphs of robo-debt judgments that did not exist. The partial refund is the easy part. The harder question is what was actually owed.

19 Apr 202613 min read
Sneakers to GPUs: The Allbirds Pivot and the Shape of an AI BubbleEconomical

Sneakers to GPUs: The Allbirds Pivot and the Shape of an AI Bubble

A failing wool-sneaker company rebranded as NewBird AI and announced a pivot to GPU-as-a-service compute. Its stock rose 582% in a single day. That is not a valuation event. It is the euphoric stage of a speculative bubble describing itself in public.

19 Apr 202610 min read
Move fast and break everything: when CEOs push AI on engineersTechnical

Move fast and break everything: when CEOs push AI on engineers

Microsoft's Satya Nadella told the world to accept AI 'slop' as a new equilibrium. In private memos, he admits Copilot 'doesn't really work'. Between the LinkedIn post and the bug queue sit the engineers shipping it: 22 per cent at critical burnout, junior hiring down 67 per cent, Windows 11 in its worst year on record.

21 Jan 202612 min read
The Salesforce reckoning: when 'less heads' means less businessCulture

The Salesforce reckoning: when 'less heads' means less business

Salesforce cut 4,000 support staff to make room for Agentforce, then admitted it had been 'too confident' about large language models. The stock fell 27 per cent, the company began rehiring 6,000 people, and an 'efficiency' decision became a case study in what happens when employees are treated as headcount rather than expertise.

20 Jan 202612 min read
Thirty billion faces: how Clearview AI made compliance the bill at the end of the mealCompliance

Thirty billion faces: how Clearview AI made compliance the bill at the end of the meal

Clearview AI scraped 30 billion faces from the open internet without asking, then sold the resulting facial-recognition tool to police, private clients and anyone with a credit card. Regulators on four continents have now answered. The fines are the easy part. The harder question is what kind of company decides, in 2026, that consent is someone else's problem.

20 Jan 202611 min read
The hidden cost of AI: how big tech's climate promises are collapsingEnvironmental

The hidden cost of AI: how big tech's climate promises are collapsing

Google's emissions are up 48 per cent since 2019. Microsoft's are up 29 per cent since 2020. Both blame AI. The two best-resourced sustainability programmes on the planet have already conceded their climate pledges to the compute race, and the bill for that decision is being paid in water, watts, and credibility well beyond their balance sheets.

20 Jan 202610 min read
The Duolingo downfall: when 'AI-first' means users lastGovernance

The Duolingo downfall: when 'AI-first' means users last

Duolingo cut its human linguists, told the AI to ship, and watched its stock fall 25 per cent as paying learners noticed the lessons had quietly degraded. The pivot is a small story. The governance failure underneath it, an AI rollout with no one accountable for whether it worked, is the part worth reading.

18 Jan 202611 min read