When Google CEO Sundar Pichai emailed his workers the company priorities for 2024 this month, developing AI responsibly was top of the list. Some employees now wonder whether Google can live up to that goal. The small team that has served as its primary internal AI ethics watchdog has lost its leader and is being restructured, according to four people familiar with the changes. A Google spokesperson says its work will continue in a stronger form going forward, but declined to provide details.

Google’s Responsible Innovation team, known as RESIN, was located inside the Office of Compliance and Integrity, in the company’s global affairs division. It reviewed internal projects for compatibility with Google’s AI principles that define rules for development and use of the technology, a crucial role as the company races to compete in generative AI. RESIN conducted over 500 reviews last year, including for the Bard chatbot, according to an annual report on AI principles work Google published this month.

RESIN’s role has looked uncertain since its leader and founder Jen Gennai, director of responsible innovation, suddenly left that role this month, say the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel changes. Gennai’s LinkedIn profile lists her as an AI ethics and compliance adviser at Google as of this month, which sources say suggests she will soon leave based on how past departures from the company played out.

Google split Gennai’s team of about 30 people into two, according to the sources. Company spokesperson Brian Gabriel says 10 percent of RESIN staffers will remain in place while 90% of the team were transferred to trust and safety, which fights abuse of Google services and also resides in the global affairs division. No one appears to have been laid off, sources say. The rationale for the changes and how responsibilities will be broken up couldn’t be learned. Some of the sources say they have not been told how AI principles reviews will be handled going forward.

Gabriel declined to say how RESIN’s work reviewing AI projects will be handled in the future but describes the shakeup as a signal of Google’s commitment to responsible AI development. The move “brought this particular Responsible AI team to the center of our well-established trust and safety efforts, which are baked into our product reviews and plans,” he says. “It will help us strengthen and scale our responsible innovation work across the company.”

Got a Tip?

Google is known for frequently reshuffling its ranks but RESIN had largely been untouched since the group’s founding. Though other teams, and hundreds of additional people, work on AI oversight at Google, RESIN was the most prominent, with a remit covering all Google’s core services.

In addition to the departure of its leader, Gennai, RESIN also saw one of its most influential members, Sara Tangdall, lead AI principles ethics specialist, leave this month. She is now responsible AI product director at Salesforce, according to her LinkedIn profile. Tangdall declined to comment and Gennai didn’t respond to calls for comment.

Google created its Responsible Innovation team in 2018 not long after AI experts and others at the company publicly rose up in protest against a Pentagon contract called Project Maven that used Google algorithms to analyze drone surveillance imagery. RESIN became the core steward of a set of AI principles introduced after the protests, which say Google will use AI to benefit people, and never for weapons or undermining human rights. Gennai helped author the principles.

Teams from across Google could submit projects for review by RESIN, which provided feedback and sometimes blocked ideas seen as breaching the AI principles. The group stopped the release of AI image generators and voice synthesis algorithms that could be used to create deepfakes.

Seeking AI principles guidance is not mandatory for most teams, unlike reviews for privacy risks, which every project must undergo. But Gennai has said early reviews of AI systems pay off by preventing costly ethical breaches. “If implemented properly, Responsible AI makes products better by uncovering and working to reduce the harm that unfair bias can cause, improving transparency and increasing security,” she said during a Google conference in 2022.

That same year, RESIN moved into the global affairs division’s compliance unit. Google described the change in an annual report on AI principles work as ensuring “more centralized governance across all Google product areas,” but some team members feared it would tilt RESIN’s work more toward protecting Google than preventing harm to consumers.

As Google fights for positioning in a new AI boom and an era where some consumers are turning to TikTok or ChatGPT instead of Google Search, some employees now worry product development could become dangerously hasty. The restructuring of RESIN has increased those concerns, the sources say.

Google has spent the past year laying off thousands of workers and streamlining its operations to more quickly deliver advances to users and focus around a few AI initiatives. It has moved to shut down services, including its Podcasts app, and cut features from Google Assistant. The ad sales that fund its sprawling pursuits have grown less reliably in the post-pandemic economy and been trimmed by new regulations and court orders on privacy and anticompetitive behavior.

Pichai and other Google leaders have said they can accelerate AI development while still being responsible about its potential dangers. Google last year joined OpenAI, Microsoft, and several other big AI developers in joining a voluntary White House pledge to assess societal risks and national security concerns related to advanced AI.

RESIN is not the only group inside Google to have been disrupted as the company scrambles to compete in generative AI. Last year the company merged UK-based AI lab DeepMind into its primary research team, Google Brain, to unify development of the so-called foundational models that underpin tools such as Bard under a new entity called Google DeepMind.

As part of that change, ethical reviews for Google’s most advanced AI models, such as the recently released Gemini, fall not to RESIN but to Google DeepMind’s Responsibility and Safety Council, according to a technical paper published last month. RESIN has already left a mark on Google’s generative AI products, a company report says, such as by triggering a decision to limit Bard from using personal pronouns to try to avoid users treating it like a human. What role the company’s long-established AI watchdog will play on future developments is unclear.

Updated 1-31-2024, 12 pm EST: This story was updated with additional comment from Google.