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