9th AAAI Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
www.aies-conference.com
www.facebook.com/AIESConf
twitter.com/AIESConf

Abstract Registration Deadline: May 14, 2026 – 11:59 AoE
Submission deadline: May 21, 2026 – 11:59pm AoE
Abstract and Submission website: https://easychair.org/conferences/directory?a=35893783
Notification: July 16, 2026
Conference: October 12-14, 2026

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a pervasive, powerful, and contested feature of contemporary society. No longer experimental artifacts, AI systems now function as infrastructural components shaping governance, labor, knowledge production, and social relations. As these systems move from design into large-scale deployment, their societal impact is increasingly driven by processes of scaling and institutional entrenchment rather than technical choices alone.

With increased interplay between AI systems and their socioeconomic and geopolitical context, notably in terms of entrenching (or countering) power asymmetries and concentrated control, social and ethical questions around who controls, deploys and governs them are ever more relevant.

While AI has the potential to empower individuals and improve society, the ethical ramifications of AI systems and their impact on human societies require deep and urgent reflection. International organizations, governments, universities, corporations, and philanthropists have recognized this need to embark on an interdisciplinary investigation to help chart a course through the new territory enabled by AI.

AIES is convened each year by program co-chairs from Computer Science, Law and Policy, the Social Sciences, Ethics and Philosophy, and welcomes a broad range of methodological approaches, including empirical, normative, participatory, critical, and technical work. Our goal is to encourage talented scholars in these and related fields to submit their best work related to morality, law, policy, psychology, the other social sciences, and AI, encouraging contributions that make their methodological commitments explicit and speak meaningfully across disciplinary boundaries. Papers should be tailored for a multi-disciplinary audience while maintaining a strong focus on excellence in research. In addition to the community of scholars who have participated in these discussions from the outset, we explicitly invite disciplinary experts who are newer to this area and who seek to break new ground in their own fields by engaging with AI. Recognizing that a multiplicity of perspectives leads to stronger science, the conference organizers actively welcome and encourage people with differing identities, expertise, backgrounds, beliefs, or experiences to participate.

AIES 2026 invites work that not only analyzes ethical and societal challenges, but helps reimagine the institutions, practices, and values needed to govern AI responsibly. We especially encourage submissions that

• are grounded in real-world AI deployments and institutional settings
• connect normative or ethical claims to concrete sociotechnical, organizational, legal, or policy contexts
• offer cross-national or comparative perspectives
• provide reflexive accounts of ethics-in-practice
• speak clearly and substantively across disciplinary boundaries

The following topics would be of interest, but the list is intended to be illustrative, not exhaustive:

Power, Governance, and Political Economy

• Governance, regulation, control, safety, and security of AI
• Accountability and responsibility across AI value chains
• Organizational, institutional, and collective responsibility for AI systems
• Post-deployment accountability, harm, and mechanisms for redress
• AI, markets, and competition
• Cultural, geopolitical, economic, employment, and other societal impacts of AI

AI Systems, Values, and Ethical Design

• Trustworthy AI systems
• Value alignment and moral decision making
• Ethical theories, models and frameworks for AI and data
• Interpretability, explainability, and transparency
• Fairness, bias, equity, and equality
• Human-centered AI, human-AI interaction, collaboration, and teaming
• Control, alignment, and scalable oversight of AI systems
• Ethics and safety in agents, embodied intelligence, and robots
• Eco-sensitive, resource-conscious (“Green”) AI design

AI in Social and Institutional Domains

• AI in law, lawmaking and the judiciary
• AI in public administration, social service provision, and social good
• AI, surveillance, and privacy
• AI, health, and wellbeing
• AI, creativity, cultural production and the arts
• AI and democracy, agency, civic participation, and social movements
• Impact of AI on humans and society

Work, Labor, and Global Inequalities

• AI, markets, and competition
• AI, labor, employment, and the future of work
• Labor relations, worker surveillance, and automation
• Marginalized, Indigenous, and Global South perspectives on AI development and governance

Critique, Consequences, and Limits of AI

• Critique, resistance, and refusal in relation to AI systems
• AI harms, failures, and non-adoption in practice
• Environmental costs and climate impacts of AI
• Societal limits, overreach, and dependency on AI

Formatting and Submission Instructions: Submitted papers may be at most 10 pages (including all figures and tables) in the 2-column style of the AAAI-2026 Author Kit, see https://aaai.org/authorkit26/. Authors may use an unlimited number of pages for non-discursive references. All submissions must be made through the EasyChair link on the conference website. Review will be doubly-anonymized, so authors should remove identifying information from their papers.

Authors may provide, but are not required, an optional ethical considerations statement, researcher positionality statement, and adverse impact statement. For an overview of positionality statements please see (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpcIVzGYhVs) and for adverse impact statements see (https://medium.com/@alexandra.olteanu/responsible-ai-research-needs-impact-statements-too-7b7141031faf). These statements may be given on one extra page at the end of the paper before references. This page will not count toward the overall page count. These sections are not meant for the discussion of methodological limitations, which should be addressed in the main paper. Authors can include supplementary materials (e.g., appendices) in a separate field on EasyChair, but reviewers will not be required to read them. Note that papers that do not follow the above formatting guidelines will be desk rejected. All materials are due on the paper deadline above.

Abstract Registration and Changes: All Authors are required to pre-register their papers through the Easychair submission site by submitting a tentative title and abstract and specifying their submission area(s). This same submission will be updated with the paper for final submission. This process will enable the Program Chairs to better anticipate the submission load and to make necessary adjustments to the program committee Changes to the author list after the submission deadline are not allowed. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for, attend, and present the work at the conference. The proceedings of the conference will be published in the AAAI Digital Library.

NOTICE REGARDING NON-ARCHIVAL, PRIOR AND CONCURRENT SUBMISSIONS: To accommodate the publishing traditions of different fields, authors of accepted papers can provide a one-page abstract for the conference proceedings, along with a URL pointing to the full paper. Authors should guarantee the link will be online and reliable for at least two years. This option is available to accommodate subsequent publication in journals that would not consider results that have been published in preliminary form in conference proceedings. The review process for such papers is unchanged. They must adhere to the same requirements and be formatted just like papers submitted for archival publication. Regardless of the choice to submit for non-archival or archival publication, papers submitted to AIES are expected to be of publication-ready quality.

Papers submitted to AIES-2026 may not be published in, or accepted for publication at, an archival conference or journal prior to submission to AIES. Papers that are a version of journal submissions currently under review are welcome as long as authors select the non-archival option. We welcome work that appears as a preprint (e.g. arXiv or SSRN). We welcome extensions of previously accepted workshop papers or abstracts with substantial new content if formally published in a Proceedings volume. To maintain anonymity, please do not cite preprints or prior versions.

Plagiarism and the use of ChatGPT or similar LLMs:

Papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis. Note that this policy does not prohibit authors from using LLMs for editing or polishing author-written text.

AAAI/ACM AIES’2026 furthermore follows AAAI policy in that any AI system, including Generative Models such as Chat-GPT, BARD, or DALL-E, do not satisfy the criteria for authorship of papers published by AAAI and, as such, also cannot be used as a citable source in papers published by AAAI. Authors assume full responsibility for content, including checking for plagiarism and veracity of all text.

Any allegation of plagiarism, whether the result of the use of an LLM or otherwise, which comes to AAAI’s attention will be thoroughly investigated. If substantiated, the matter will be dealt with very seriously. Possible sanctions include rejection/retraction of the work, notification to all the authors’ institutions or employers and any other relevant bodies, and denial of service for and access to all AAAI-sponsored meetings.

Conference program co-chairs:
Aylin Caliskan, University of Washington

Conference general co-chairs:

Virginia Dignum, Umeå University

Petter Ericson, Umeå University

Please contact aies26@easychair.org with any questions.