Safety Consultant Discovers His Entire Hire Was Pretend

Marcus Reeves, 34, ethics consultant hired last month by an AI firm in San Francisco, spent his first three weeks attempting to schedule meetings with the product team before realizing his role existed solely to absorb liability in the event of future misconduct. Reeves had been recruited to head a newly created Safety and Ethics division after the company's language model was found to have been trained on material that violated its own stated policies. A company spokesperson confirmed that Reeves was given a title, a business card, and access to a Slack channel where he received no messages.

"I assumed the office and the email address meant I was supposed to do things," Reeves said. He did not respond to a request for further comment after learning that his hiring announcement had been drafted before his first day, and that his department's annual budget of eight thousand dollars was allocated entirely to the nameplate on his door.

I assumed the office and the email address meant I was supposed to do things.

Documents obtained by Reeves show that the position was designed with no direct report to executive leadership, no decision-making authority, and no obligation to review company practices before they were deployed. Instead, Reeves was given a mandate to produce monthly reports on topics of his choosing, which would be filed in a shared drive that nobody had access to. A former product manager who worked at the firm said the arrangement was standard practice. "You hire someone to be the ethics person so that when something goes wrong, you can point to the ethics person and say we had processes," the former manager said, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss personnel matters.

At press time, Reeves had been told he could begin attending company all-hands meetings but was not permitted to ask questions. His performance review is scheduled for next month, and the company has already selected the consultant who will explain why his role is being eliminated in the name of operational efficiency.