Today, the only thing that is new/novel is what I woudl call “ethics theater” as a deliberate institutional strategy. Prior industries dismissed ethics work mostly through indifference or commercial pressure. The major AI labs have in some cases built ethics functions specifically to produce the appearance of ethical deliberation while maintaining the operational independence to proceed regardless of what that deliberation finds. The Timnit Gebru case at Google is documented well enough to make this claim specifically rather than generally. The ethics function was used, in that instance, to suppress findings rather than incorporate them.