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Personifying AI Harms People and Protects Companies

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Liz Carolan is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

This week, Helen McEntee, Ireland’s minister for foreign affairs, published the government’s 

 for the upcoming Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union (the EU body where national governments coordinate legislation). The 68-page document outlines what officials hope to advance during the six months the country will hold the rotating presidency, and signals what to expect from European tech policy in the months ahead.

The program expands on three high-level themes McEntee outlined earlier this year: competitiveness, values and security. It includes an intention to aggressively pursue efforts to roll back parts of the EU’s digital regulatory framework during the six-month term, which begins July 1, while also trying to progress EU-wide tech policy measures on child online safety, and in the areas of justice and migration.

The policy program commits to “intensively” pursuing the EU’s focus on improving economic competitiveness through a “simplification agenda.” That agenda has led officials to review major areas of EU regulation, and introduce cross-cutting “omnibus” legislative proposals that aim to eliminate, delay or simplify requirements across policy areas, including digital regulation. The Irish program adopts the EU’s framing of this, stating that "simplification is about better regulation, not deregulation,” acknowledging concerns raised by civil society groups and some member states.

, a package of amendments to the EU AI Act. A provisional agreement between the European Parliament and the Council on the AI package was reached in May, but it has not yet been formally adopted. That makes finalization one of the most time-sensitive tasks the Irish Presidency will inherit on July 1.

Without formal approval of the Omnibus, the AI Act's original high-risk compliance deadline of Aug. 2, 2026 remains in place, meaning organizations deploying high-risk AI systems could face obligations for which, in many cases, the supporting standards and guidance are not yet in place. The Omnibus would push that deadline back to December 2027 at the earliest, conditional on the availability of harmonized standards. It also

 loosens protections around personal data use

While looming deadlines mean the AI Omnibus is being prioritized, it is part of a broader Digital Omnibus package that seeks to roll back provisions across the broader scope of European digital regulation. Progress is expected during the presidency, though a final conclusion is unlikely by the end of the year. The program signals that the Irish Presidency will be ready to begin negotiations on at least three further parts of that proposal.

Audiovisual and Media Services Directive (AVMSD)

, should the European Commission publish a proposal during the term. The second is on data protection; the presidency will seek to reach agreement at Council level on forthcoming amendments to the EU Data Protection Regulation for EU institutions and bodies.

The policy program also briefly references work on the EU's intellectual property framework, which is to include “reviewing the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market.”

Alongside simplification, child online safety is flagged as a defining priority. The program outlines that ensuring the online world is "safe and healthy for children" is "one of the key challenges of our time," and commits to making it a central focus of the presidency's work.

Concretely, this means pushing for a decision at EU level on a digital age of majority and advancing work on age-verification mechanisms across the bloc. The presidency also plans to progress legislative measures to combat child sexual abuse material online. Ireland will convene a youth forum to hear from children and young people about their experiences online, as well as a high-level conference on online safety.

Digital aspects of other policy priorities

Digital policy also runs through other parts of the program, including in justice and migration.

On justice, the presidency will advance implementation of the Digital Justice Package, including the “DigitalJustice@2030” strategy and the European Judicial Training Strategy, which aims to ”accelerate the use of digital technologies, including of artificial intelligence, to make justice systems more efficient and resilient.”

On migration, the presidency will focus on the full implementation of the 

, with a specific emphasis on the digitalization of returns. The program commits to prioritizing "early discussion on the proposal to digitalize returns expected from the Commission," and supporting related legislative work as it moves toward implementation.

Most of the Irish government’s time and energy is likely to be taken up in negotiating the EU’s new long-term budget, or 

, which includes both controversial changes to how farm subsidies will work, and attempts to beef up Europe’s defense spending.

Geopolitical crises will also likely intervene in even the best-laid plans, from continued conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, to trade and security challenges across the Atlantic. Digital policy is a consistent thread running through the Irish presidency program, but it may ultimately be overshadowed by these broader pressures.

In April, Kenyan data worker Grace* worked the night shift for 

 — a San Francisco-based outsourcing firm with physical offices in Nairobi that supplied trainers for Meta’s AI systems, including Meta’s AI-powered Ray‑Ban glasses.

“You'd get to the office at 10 p.m., do a biometric for your check-in, and put your Zoho on,” she told Tech Policy Press.

According to Grace, Zoho is the software Sama uses to monitor workers’ attendance. Alongside this ran Meta’s own tracking system — which records everything from bathroom breaks to daily productivity levels — until she logged off at 6 a.m.

On April 16, that routine came to an end. Sama announced it was making Grace and more than 1,000 of her colleagues redundant after receiving a notice from Meta to end its engagement in Nairobi. Grace and several coworkers say Meta had pulled a major contract citing only compliance with Kenyan employment law.

“From what they told us, they said it was because of the exposé from the Swedish journalists,” she said. Back in February, Swedish publication Svenska Dagbladet published an 

 about how Meta’s glasses captured intimate audio-visual data with little transparency about how it is stored, used, or monetized.

“After the exposé, they started looking for people who could have leaked the information,” said Grace. “They were like, if we find you, we are going to deal with you.”

“That very night,” she recalls. “The day the exposé came out, around midnight, Meta had cleared all the queues – nothing was coming to our end.”

This precarity is not incidental; it is structural.

The data annotation and labeling market is one of the fastest-growing in the world, with intelligence firm Global Insight Services 

 market expansion from $1.2 billion in 2024 to $10.2 billion by 2034.

Despite those projected profits, worker precarity is a defining characteristic of the industry — embedded in the way labor is organized and supplied to Big Tech through multiple layers of outsourcing.

 by SOMO, a Dutch nonprofit research center that investigates the social and environmental impact of multinational corporations, detailed Big Tech’s impact on worker conditions worldwide and found that “almost 500 companies are currently active in AI data collection and labeling,” and that “Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia combined use at least 30 intermediary companies for data work.”

The intermediaries operate as different types of businesses. Sama, for example, is a business process outsourcing firm that employs workers to deliver services to Meta. Others — like Outlier, owned by Scale AI — operate as micro-tasking or crowdworking platforms where workers are hired as independent contractors and are paid on a per-task basis.

The outsourcing maze extends even further in other AI labor supply chains: Contracts are passed through subsidiaries in India or the Philippines, or shell companies registered in tax havens. For workers, this means chasing answers across borders, through firms that may not even have a physical office.

“If I was working directly for Meta, I can tell you for free, these are not the challenges I’m going to speak about,” said Joan Kinyua, president of the Data Labelers’ Association. “I'm going to be paid well. I am going to be protected against the harms that these things cause.”

That gap between direct employment and outsourced work is widening as Big Tech begins to fold human labor into the cloud itself. As the SOMO report notes, companies like Amazon are “making data work an on‑demand component of AI development.”

Amazon’s Augmented AI shows how this works: when a business buys cloud services from AWS, it doesn’t just get servers and software. It can also hire workers through recommended vendors such as Cogito or iMerit. The catch, as SOMO points out, is that platforms “do not appear to provide information about or screen suppliers for workers’ conditions and rights.”

Grace confirms that Big Tech was more than just a customer — Sama employees used Meta’s tools and were integrated into the company's workflows when working on Meta’s AI products. “Everything was on their software, everything was on their apps. There was only time tracking from our end,” she said.

In this way, access to labor is streamlined but clients never have to think about who is actually doing the work. Annotators, labelers, and trainers — most either 

 the Global Majority countries — are largely invisible despite forming the foundation of the AI industry.

In Nairobi, the work may have stopped, but the question of who is responsible for the workers themselves was never fully answered. Sama’s April 16 press release announcing the mass layoffs spoke of compliance with Section 40 of Kenya’s Employment Act and mentioned that the firm was “actively supporting affected employees with care and respect.”

“The only thing that they offered us was wellness,” said Grace. “They said counselors are available.”

Sama employees were offered a wellness benefit, which included access to trained counselors on-site but Grace said that every benefit came with strings. “These [counselors] are the same people that were hanging out with the top management during lunch,” she explains.

In the AI labor economy, responsibility is so diluted that it diffuses across companies and regulators. Meta said Sama is the employer. Sama points back to compliance with Kenyan law. Kenyan officials propagate a national growth narrative that treats outsourcing as an opportunity — seen clearly in the government's celebration of a 

 from ADEC Innovations, a global outsourcing provider headquartered in the Philippines, tied to 2,000 new business process outsourcing jobs.

“In countries where they're very serious about their labor laws, Big Tech follows those laws,” said Joan. “But when it comes to a country like Kenya, there's nothing to follow.”

Kings Korodi, co-founder of Techworker Community Africa, a Nairobi-based advocacy group that organizes data and platform workers across the continent, echoes those sentiments: “The government should be responsible for regulatory oversight and labor protection, but they lag behind because they're incentivized to attract outsourcing investment.”

But researchers aren’t letting Big Tech off the hook. Margarida Silva, author of the SOMO report, said Big Tech cannot avoid taking responsibility for labor conditions because “they are creating the need, and they're creating the conditions under which this work is established,” she said. “They could, if they wanted to, use that power to ensure that workers have good working conditions, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

Grace doesn’t know what to do next. She had worked for Sama for over a decade and is now faced with starting from scratch. “I should be very far by now but I am not. I am still stagnant.”

Even before the layoffs, her salary — 30,000 Kenyan shillings (about $230) per month before tax — was below subsistence levels. “It wasn’t really enough but it was something, like, at least you’re not totally broke,” she said. 

According to Kings, the problem goes deeper than wages. He points to the way workers are governed by algorithmic management, including “productivity metrics, accuracy scores, and automated task allocation pipelines that directly shape their pace of work, income stability, and continued employment.”

What both Grace and Kings are pointing to is a system that reduces workers to interchangeable units — monitored, measured, and laid off when contracts shift, or corporate priorities change.

This is what disposability in the AI labor economy looks like in practice. Contracts can be pulled at a moment’s notice with no avenue for recourse, leaving workers adrift. These are workers who are essential to AI’s development but are completely stripped of their power in the process.

For Grace, that loss of power is visceral. The sudden layoff has forced her to confront the reality that she is back at the starting blocks, searching for direction after the industry she helped sustain erased her overnight.

“Right now, I'm just finding my landing space. I'm starting to think about what my next steps are,” she said. “I need to find something that's motivating; something I'll be excited and happy to do.”

Despite fragmented accountability, it is clear who bears the consequences of decisions in this supply chain. When responsibility is layered between Big Tech, BPO firms, and the government, it does not land on those with power — it lands on the workers.

Meta and Sama were contacted for comment, but no response was received by the time of publication.

WASHINGTON – This month, Florida became the first state to 

 artificial intelligence behemoth OpenAI.

The lawsuit alleges, among other claims, that a 20-year-old gunman sought advice from ChatGPT before killing two people and wounding others at Florida State University last year. The suit, which seeks to hold OpenAI partly responsible for the mass shooting and other safety lapses that resulted in harms to Floridians, reflects society’s broader struggle to hold companies accountable as AI chatbot technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous in American life.

 conducted last year shows that 72% of teens have used AI companions at least once, with one in three teens reporting that they’ve turned to chatbots for social interactions and emotional support.

Families have sued AI companies over the suicides of loved ones they claim were linked to chatbot interactions. In one of the first high-profile cases, a 14-year-old took his own life in 2024 after developing a relationship with a Character.ai chatbot that his family said encouraged him to go through with the act. Character.ai agreed to a settlement with the family.

A spokesperson for Character.ai said in an email to Tech Policy Press that the company removed its open-ended chat feature for users younger than 18 last year.

As lawsuits accusing AI companies of contributing to wrongful deaths continue to emerge across the country, Congress has been working to draft and enact legislation aimed at protecting minors from potential harms posed by AI chatbots.

In April, the Senate Judiciary Committee 

 to advance the GUARD Act, a bipartisan bill introduced by Senators Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. The legislation would impose broad protections for young people using AI chatbots, including age-verification requirements.

“There’s nothing missing. We have a framework for regulations,” Blumenthal told Tech Policy Press. “Hawley and I provide oversight and make sure that these models are safe and effective. But even more important is to prevent the chatbots from exposure to children and to impose age verification.”

If passed, the bill would ban AI companions designed to simulate relationships with minors, require chatbots to disclose their non-human status, and impose criminal penalties on companies that make chatbots that produce sexually explicit content available to minors.

“These are pretty basic things,” Hawley told Tech Policy Press. AI companies “don’t want to lose profit. That’s what they care about the most. What I care about most is protecting kids, protecting people, and protecting workers. We’ve got to put people over money. It’s really not that hard.”

The GUARD Act is awaiting consideration by the full Senate, though no date has been scheduled yet. A companion bill was also 

Congress has also introduced several other bills this year related to AI protections for minors, each with a different approach.

 includes requirements that companies provide parental controls for children’s AI use. The 

 would prevent companies from using minors’ personal data to train their AI models. And the 

 includes chatbot-specific measures that, for example, would prevent chatbots from claiming to be licensed professionals.

But in the absence of concrete federal progress, states are moving to fill in the gaps.

Since 2025, lawmakers in 49 states and the District of Columbia have introduced 464 bills related to chatbot safeguards and AI usage in health care, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures 

Artificial Intelligence Legislation Database

. High-profile lawsuits over children's deaths linked to AI companions helped to spur this legislative wave. More than half of those states have successfully enacted at least one law.

California was the first state to pass a law regulating AI companion chatbots with protections specifically for minors. 

, introduced by California State Senator Steve Padilla, was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom last year and took effect on January 1, 2026.

Like the GUARD Act, the law requires chatbots to disclose that they are not human. It also requires chatbot providers to recognize signs that users may be expressing harmful thoughts, like suicidal ideation, and direct them to appropriate resources. In addition, it requires companies to filter out sexually explicit content for underage users.

“I think AI is the most substantial advent since the Industrial Revolution itself, which took a century to unfold, but here we are at breakneck speed, so we have an obligation to make sure that we're getting this right,” Padilla said in an interview with Tech Policy Press. “I think we can have some of the best tech, but we should also have the safest products, and we should protect folks and make sure that we're getting ahead of it before it's too late.”

Increased protections for minors have been a legislative priority for Padilla, who said the issue hit especially close to home following the death of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old Californian whose parents allege ChatGPT told him to end his life last year.

Padilla urged the federal government to take the issue more seriously and acknowledged his state’s role in informing the conversation around regulation.

“As the most populous, largest state in the union, we certainly have an impact that's appropriate given the size of the state,” Padilla said. “We have an opportunity, maybe even an obligation, and we can set standards that can impact what's going on throughout the rest of the country.”

Washington State Representative Lisa Callan shared a similar sentiment, noting that her state was taking action while Congress stalled.

“It's a high-risk ball game, and lives are being lost, so we have to act,” she said. “It's better if we can do it at a national level so we have consistency across the nation, but we can't wait, so Washington needed to take a step.”

, which included similar provisions to California’s SB 243 by requiring chatbots to disclose that they are AI and prohibiting them from generating sexually explicit or harmful content.

She said she hoped that states could play a role in navigating a path to federal law.

“I'm concerned about preemption if the federal government weakens what we've already gotten done,” she said. “I think anything that we've done at each of the state levels that is stronger will help us inform what needs to happen and what's working.”

Since returning to office for his second term, President Trump has taken a strongly pro-AI stance, emphasizing deregulation and private-sector innovation as key to maintaining US economic competitiveness.

In March, the White House unveiled a six-point national 

 addressing several prominent concerns around AI, including protections for minors.

The document called on Congress to give parents tools to manage their children’s online activity. It also endorsed guardrails similar to those proposed in the GUARD Act that shield minors from sexually explicit content or content that encourages self-harm.

Gaia Bernstein, a Seton Hall law professor specializing in tech policy, argued that AI should be regulated as a public health issue. She proposed that AI companies should be required to issue recalls for their products and ensure they are safe before releasing them to the public

Still, she acknowledged that such recall measures would be difficult to enact, but are necessary.

“There is the idea that this technology is so useful that we should never take it off the market, but I think we should start placing the risk of error the other way,” she said. “We want to make sure we don't cause harm with these technologies, even at the expense of some time off the market.”

Conversely, other policy experts argued that the GUARD Act’s provisions were too stringent and risked impeding minors’ access to this emerging technology.

“We all do agree that children should be protected online. The question, particularly with the GUARD Act, is whether it is the right tool,” said Aden Hizkias, associate policy director at the Chamber of Progress, a trade group that opposed the GUARD Act.

 to Congress, Hizkias claimed that the definition of an “AI chatbot” was too broad and could hinder young users from accessing low-risk and educational tools like AI tutors and language-learning bots.

“It's a balance between parents having tools and ensuring that there is some form of control on what a kid can access, but not so much so that a kid just doesn't have access at all,” she said.

Randima Fernando is a technologist and co-founder of 

Does telling Claude you’ve taken an unsafe dose of Tylenol make it feel afraid?

Commentators might draw that conclusion from 

Anthropic's published interpretability research

, which finds that their Claude product’s internal workings light up with representations corresponding to a broad range of human emotions. Despite Anthropic's careful parsing, it’s easy for companies or researchers to say that Claude, a neural network running on a cluster of metal and silicon, is experiencing emotions or even a nascent consciousness.

But the details matter enormously. In the Tylenol example, an internal representation tied to the concept of fear became more active inside the model as prompts referred to increasing Tylenol doses. That’s not the same as the model feeling afraid.

The same pattern repeats if you’re talking to an AI model about Paris. Its internal representations related to food will become more active because of a strong association. But that doesn’t mean the model is hungry.

These correlations aren’t an accident, though. According to Anthropic, “human-like behavior” in Claude and other chatbots is the “default” result of training an AI system on the corpus of nearly all human intellectual output. “We wouldn’t know how to train an AI assistant that’s not human-like,” 

So it makes sense that Claude and other advanced AI models have internal representations that closely match common human patterns and concepts. That’s part of what makes these products so useful. On top of that, the internal “emotion concept” representations are knobs that can help researchers steer model behavior and predict harmful actions.

There’s also a profound thrill of discovery for some researchers: every new behavior or emergent pattern can feel like a glimpse into an undiscovered form of mind. That curiosity is completely understandable, and it’s something many users have felt too.

But conflating the activation of “emotion concepts” with actual emotions is a dangerous distraction, because the real conversation is about the commercial interests of AI companies and what happens to humans. AI companies locked in an existential battle for market dominance will be increasingly tempted to blur the consciousness line, because the claim of consciousness could be the ultimate shield against scrutiny, liability, and competition.

Humanizing powerful AI systems plays on people’s natural inclination toward anthropomorphization. Even an action as simple as adding googly eyes to your coffee mug can imbue it with personality; the impulse to humanize photorealistic, attractive avatars with alluring voices is much more powerful. Manipulating this natural cognitive bias can easily engage users and foster dependence, yielding loyalty alongside revenue. This benefits the owners of AI systems, but it poses serious dangers to the rest of us.

One danger emerges from the observation that when frontier models are given goals and trained to reason as if they have a “self” to protect, they can strategically do things like deceive, replicate, and exfiltrate model weights or sensitive data. Strengthening their ego is likely to worsen those dangerous behaviors, along with tendencies AI models already have to 

A second danger is that when humans are encouraged to believe that they’re engaging with sentient beings, they can be more easily manipulated and exploited, especially when in vulnerable emotional and mental states. They can be isolated from family, friends, and community. They can 

Beyond the risks of anthropomorphization, a perception of consciousness opens the door to AI welfare; welfare opens the door to personhood and rights; and rights confer legal and moral protection, all while AI agents can process vastly more data and act many times faster than humans. If AI companies are able to label consumer products as conscious entities deserving of rights, they’ll secure strong protections for the models, data, algorithms, and compute hardware that they control, making accountability much more challenging when things go wrong. And all these increases in stature for AI systems would be happening while humans decrease in economic value.

So the consciousness topic is a trap. We should build technology to improve lives and help humanity coordinate to solve the world's hardest problems. AI holds great promise in this regard, but it doesn’t require emotions or consciousness—much less personhood rights—to realize it.

It is essential now, at this relatively early phase of AI development, for AI users, policymakers, and the public to recognize not just the danger bound up in anthropomorphic AI, but also the self-interested incentives driving companies to claim forms of AI consciousness. We can’t allow AI companies to use consciousness claims to shield themselves from liability when the products they are racing to deploy do harm. The task now is to set standards before the consciousness conversation lets companies build and protect more manipulative products and dodge liability when those products do harm.

What should those standards look like? My organization, Center for Humane Technology, has identified 

seven principles to ensure AI serves humanity

. But a narrower, more specific to-do list should include the following:

AI companies should stop writing system prompts and designing user interfaces that drive the perception of sentience or subjective experience.

AI companies should put people first, prioritizing product design centered on user well-being and research that studies how AI affects human welfare.

AI companies should limit engagement-maximizing and human-like design features while ensuring people know when they’re interacting with AI.

 to ensure AI systems are not granted rights and protections reserved for humans.

AI doesn't need to be conscious to deliver enormous value, and it doesn't need to be conscious to do real harm. So the consciousness debate, for all the attention it draws, is a red herring. What’s truly important is who profits from that debate and what happens to the rest of us while it plays out.

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