Solving AI ethics? Hybrid expertise and professional power in EU ethics governance

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ABSTRACT The governance of artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a priority for regulators around the world. Analysing the EU’s approach to AI ethics governance, this article traces how early initiatives from the ‘European Group on Ethics’ and the ‘High-Level Expert Group on AI’ sparked a series of sectoral expert negotiations to transpose general ethics principles into concrete and operationalizable guidelines. Drawing on knowledge mobilisation scholarship, we investigate how mobilizations of technical and ethics expertise shape these processes and affect the EU’s problem-solving capacity. Focusing on the insurance sector, we argue that the sectoral anchoring of ethics governance creates a public policy dilemma characterised by a seeming impossibility to align the logics of ethics governance with the reality of stakeholder conflict. Triangulating interview data, internal documents, and secondary data, we demonstrate how the institutional structure empowered a professional group with recognised claims to hybrid expertise to ‘solve’ AI ethics while also strengthening their own professional position within the insurance industry. This ‘instrumentalization from below’ illustrates how ethics governance can be not only captured by political actors to legitimize pre-existing policy preferences but also be used strategically to advance industry and professional interests.