“I started having regular breakdowns,” says Mitchell, who founded and co-led the company’s Ethical AI team. “That was not something that I had ever experienced before.”

Only after she spoke with a therapist did she understand the problem: she was burnt out. She ended up taking medical leave because of stress.

Mitchell, who now works as an AI researcher and chief ethics scientist at the AI startup Hugging Face, is far from alone in her experience. Burnout is becoming increasingly common in responsible-AI teams, says Abhishek Gupta, the founder of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute and a responsible-AI consultant at Boston Consulting Group.