Management and the product teams want to ship features. Research wants to work in cool new stuff. Nobody wants people from random other teams getting in their way and telling them to slow down. It’s hard enough getting meaningful work shipped in these huge companies. When the stars align to do somethin major and execs are pushing hard, nobody on teams actually doing the work give a damn what some rando on another team thinks about “ethics”.
Harsh but that’s the way it is. In this environment it can actually be more effective to distribute the function to be inside the actual product teams. Which it seems like they did. Sometimes it’s easier to have an impact from the inside. (Sometimes not.)
No connections to MS. I’ve just seen this movie before… a lot.