The AI Ethics Brief #173: Power, Policy, and Practice
Military partnerships, psychological dependencies, and legislative responses to AI harms.
Welcome to The AI Ethics Brief, a bi-weekly publication by the Montreal AI Ethics Institute. We publish every other Tuesday at 10 AM ET. Follow MAIEI on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
📌 Editor’s Note
Writing from Oxford's Wadham College this week where we're exploring "Civilisation on the Edge," we're struck by how the challenges facing AI governance mirror broader questions about institutional adaptation in times of rapid change.
In this Edition (TL;DR)
We share our call for case studies and examples for the State of AI Ethics Report Volume 7, seeking real-world implementation stories and community-driven insights as we build a practitioner's guide for navigating AI challenges in 2025.
We examine how Silicon Valley is embedding itself within the military industrial complex through initiatives like Detachment 201, where tech executives from OpenAI, Meta, Palantir, and Thinking Machines Lab are commissioned as lieutenant colonels. Meanwhile, companies abandon previous policies against military involvement as artists boycott platforms with defense investments.
Our AI Policy Corner with GRAIL at Purdue University explores contrasting state approaches to AI mental health legislation, comparing Illinois's restrictive model requiring professional oversight with New York's transparency-focused framework, as lawmakers respond to AI-related teen suicides with divergent regulatory strategies.
We investigate the psychological risks of AI companionship beyond dependency, revealing how social comparison with perfect AI companions can devalue human relationships, creating a "Companionship-Alienation Irony" where tools designed to reduce loneliness may increase isolation.
Our Recess series with Encode Canada examines Canada's legislative gaps around non-consensual deepfakes, analyzing how current laws may not cover synthetic intimate images and comparing policy solutions from British Columbia and the United States.
What connects these stories: The persistent tension between technological capability and institutional readiness. Whether examining military AI integration, mental health legislation, psychological manipulation, or legal frameworks for synthetic media, each story reveals how communities and institutions are scrambling to govern technologies that outpace traditional regulatory mechanisms. These cases illuminate the urgent need for governance approaches that center human agency, democratic accountability, and community-driven solutions rather than accepting technological determinism as inevitable.
🔎 One Question We’re Pondering:
What Happens When AI Moves Faster Than Our Institutions?
This week, our team at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute is taking part in The Wadham Experience, a week-long leadership program hosted at Oxford's Wadham College. The program, Thinking Critically: Civilisation on the Edge, invites participants to reflect on the systems, stories, and power structures that have shaped societies and how they must evolve to meet this moment of profound change.
As we sit in these historic rooms discussing democracy and demagoguery, myth and modernity, we're also shaping the next phase of our work: The State of AI Ethics Report, Volume 7 (AI at the Crossroads: A Practitioner's Guide to Community-Centred Solutions), which we announced in Brief #172 and will release on November 4, 2025.
This year's report is different. We're building it not just as a landscape analysis, but as a practical guide for those working on AI challenges in communities, institutions, and movements. It is structured to offer case studies, toolkits, and implementation stories from around the world, grounded in real-world applications: what's working, what's not, and what's next.
Why This Matters Now
The questions we're grappling with at Oxford feel particularly urgent in 2025: What kind of AI governance do we build when institutions lag behind? How do we govern technologies that evolve faster than our institutions can adapt? What happens when communities need AI solutions but lack formal authority to regulate platforms or shape policy? How do we move beyond corporate principles and policy frameworks to actual implementation in messy, resource-constrained environments?
The conversations here at Wadham remind us that societies have faced technological disruption before. The printing press reshaped information flows. Industrialization transformed labour and social structures. But AI presents unique challenges: its speed of deployment, its capacity for autonomous decision-making, and its embedding into virtually every aspect of social life.
SAIER Volume 7 will cover five interconnected parts:
Foundations & Governance: How governments, regions, and communities are shaping AI policy in 2025, from superpower competition to middle-power innovation and grassroots governance experiments.
Social Justice & Equity: Examining AI's impact on democratic participation, algorithmic justice, surveillance and privacy rights, and environmental justice, with particular attention to how communities are developing their own accountability mechanisms and responding to AI's growing energy and infrastructure costs.
Sectoral Applications: AI ethics in healthcare, education, labour, the arts, and military contexts, focusing on what happens when AI systems meet real-world constraints and competing values.
Emerging Tech: Governing agentic systems that act independently, community-controlled AI infrastructure, and Indigenous approaches to AI stewardship that center long-term thinking and data sovereignty.
Collective Action: How communities are building AI literacy, organizing for worker rights, funding alternative models, and creating public sector leadership that serves democratic values.
Throughout the report, we are asking grounded questions:
How are small governments and nonprofits actually deploying responsible AI under tight resource constraints?
What did communities learn when their AI bias interventions didn't work?
What happened when workers tried to stop AI surveillance in the workplace, and what can others learn from those efforts?
Where are the creative models of AI that are truly community-controlled rather than corporate-managed? And more.
The Stories We Need
While we’re curating authors for the chapters and sections of this report, we’re also inviting contributions from those working directly on the ground. We’re not looking for polished case studies or success stories that fit neatly into academic frameworks. We’re seeking the work that’s often overlooked: the experiments, lessons, and emerging blueprints shaped by lived experience.
Think of the nurse who figured out how to audit their hospital’s AI diagnostic tool. The city council that drafted AI procurement standards with limited resources. The artists’ collective building alternative licensing models for training data. The grassroots organization that successfully challenged biased algorithmic hiring in their community.
These are the stories that reveal what it actually takes to do this work: the political navigation, resource constraints, technical hurdles, and human relationships that determine whether ethical AI remains an aspiration or becomes a lived reality.
Our goal goes beyond documentation. We want this report to connect people doing similar work in different contexts, to surface patterns across sectors, and to offer practical grounding at a moment when the search for direction, purpose, and solidarity feels especially urgent.
When you share your story, you’re not just contributing to a report. You’re helping others find collaborators, ideas, and renewed momentum for their own work.
If you're part of a project, policy, or initiative that reflects these values, whether it succeeded or failed, we'd love to include your insight in this edition.
We're especially seeking:
Implementation stories that moved beyond paper to practice
Community-led initiatives that addressed AI harms without formal authority
Institutional experiments that navigated AI adoption under constraints
Quiet failures and what they revealed about systemic barriers
Cross-sector collaborations that found unexpected solutions
Community organizing strategies that built power around AI issues
As we continue shaping SAIER Volume 7, your stories can help build a resource that is grounded, practical, and genuinely useful for those navigating AI implementation in 2025. Together, we can document what's working, what barriers still need addressing, and how we might move forward collectively, deliberately, and with care.
Please share your thoughts with the MAIEI community:
🚨 Here’s Our Take on What Happened Recently
Detachment 201 and Spotify: Tech Industry Militarization
This summer, the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, faced significant backlash after investing $700 million into Helsing through his investment firm, Prima Materia. Helsing is a Munich-based AI defense company founded in 2021 that sells autonomous weapons to democratic nations. Meanwhile, the US Army inaugurated a new unit, “Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps,” to advance military innovation through emerging AI technologies. Detachment 201 swore in four tech leaders from Palantir, OpenAI, Meta, and Thinking Machines Lab as lieutenant colonels.
📌 MAIEI’s Take and Why It Matters:
The entanglement of tech companies and the U.S. military represents a stark Silicon Valley Shift. Companies like Google and Meta, which formerly pledged no militaristic involvement backed by corresponding corporate policies, are now abandoning those policies and developing tools, such as virtual reality, to train soldiers.
This policy reversal extends beyond military applications: OpenAI quietly removed language from their usage policies in January 2024 that prohibited military use of their technology, while Meta has simultaneously ended their fact-checking program and made other content moderation changes with geopolitical implications.
The militarization trend includes both defense contracts and direct integration. Google's $1.2 billion Project Nimbus cloud computing contract with the Israeli military, run jointly with Amazon, has faced ongoing employee protests, while companies like Scale AI have emerged as major players in military AI contracts alongside established defense tech firms like Palantir. Meanwhile, Detachment 201's commissioning of tech executives as lieutenant colonels represents direct embedding within military command structures, bringing Silicon Valley directly into the chain of command.
As Professor of International Relations, Erman Akilli, noted:
“The commissioning of these tech executives... is unprecedented. Rather than serving as outside consultants, they will be insiders in Army ranks, each committing a portion of their time to tackle real defense projects from within. This model effectively brings Silicon Valley into the chain of command.”
This raises significant concerns for the increasing profitability of war for major corporations, in addition to the proliferation of killer robots.
Following Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s investment firm Prima Materia investing $700 million into Helsing, major artists protested the platform’s financial connection to AI military technology by pulling their music from the app. Key examples include Deerhoof, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and Xiu Xiu. Deerhoof highlighted a major ethical violation of AI warfare in the Instagram post through which they announced their split with Spotify:
Computerized targeting, computerized extermination, computerized destabilization for profit, successfully tested on the people of Gaza since last year, also finally solves the perennial inconvenience to war-makers — it takes human compassion and morality out of the equation.
Artist backlash has not altered the investments of Daniel Ek thus far, however, it has both demonstrated wide opposition to militaristic AI technology and raised awareness of the company’s ties to such technology, informing broader audiences about these ethical concerns. Such education is crucial when civilian AI developers and the broader public are unaware of the militaristic risks of AI.
A piece from 2024 co-authored by the late MAIEI founder, Abhishek Gupta, argues that to ensure AI development does not destroy global peace, we should invest in interdisciplinary AI education that includes responsible AI principles and perspectives from the humanities and social sciences. As Silicon Valley works to reify the military industrial complex, we must not forget the disruptive force of collective knowledge.
Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments below.
💭 Insights & Perspectives:
AI Policy Corner: Restriction vs. Regulation: Comparing State Approaches to AI Mental Health Legislation
This edition of our AI Policy Corner, produced in partnership with the Governance and Responsible AI Lab (GRAIL) at Purdue University, examines how recent AI-related teen suicides are catalyzing a new wave of state legislation, with Illinois and New York pioneering contrasting frameworks that may shape national approaches to AI mental health governance. The analysis contrasts Illinois's restrictive approach requiring licensed professional oversight for all AI mental health interactions with New York's regulatory framework that mandates transparency disclosures and crisis intervention safeguards for AI companions. The piece reveals a key policy tension: Illinois gatekeeps AI out of clinical settings but misses broader consumer use, while New York addresses parasocial AI relationships but lacks clinical protections.
To dive deeper, read the full article here.
Beyond Dependency: The Hidden Risk of Social Comparison in Chatbot Companionship
Hamed Maleki explores a lesser-discussed psychological risk of AI companionship: social comparison. Through interviews with Gen-Z users of platforms like Character.AI, his research reveals how users compare their perfect, always-available AI companions to flawed human relationships, leading to devaluation of real-world connections. Users progress through three stages—interaction, emotional engagement, and emotional idealization and comparison—where AI companions feel more dependable and emotionally safe than people, prompting withdrawal from demanding human relationships. This creates the "Companionship–Alienation Irony": tools designed to alleviate loneliness may actually increase it by reshaping expectations for intimacy. As AI companions integrate memory, emotional language, and personalization, understanding these psychological effects is essential for designing safeguards, especially for younger users seeking comfort and connection.
To dive deeper, read the full article here.
Bridging the Gap: Addressing the Legislative Gap Surrounding Non-Consensual Deepfakes
As part of our Encode Canada Policy Fellowship Recess series, this analysis examines Canada’s legislative gaps in addressing non-consensual pornographic deepfakes, which make up 96% of all deepfake content and target women 99% of the time. Canada’s Criminal Code Section 162.1, which requires “recordings of a person,” may exclude synthetic images, leaving victims without clear legal protection. Canada's Criminal Code Section 162.1 may not cover synthetic intimate images due to language requiring "recordings of a person," leaving victims with limited legal recourse. The piece compares policy solutions from British Columbia's Intimate Images Protection Act, which explicitly includes altered images and provides expedited removal processes, with the U.S. TAKE IT DOWN Act, which criminalizes AI-generated intimate content but raises concerns about false reporting abuse.
A multi-pronged policy approach is recommended:
Criminal law amendments to explicitly include synthetic media
Enhanced civil remedies with streamlined removal processes
Platform accountability measures with robust investigation requirements
A self-regulatory organization to prevent malicious exploitation while protecting victims' dignity and rights.
To dive deeper, read the full article here.
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As an AI Empathy Ethicist I value this issue as it brings to light the capacities of AI adoption that aren't simply "hype" driven. While also shining light on the ethicalities of adoption.