AIES 2026 — AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

AIES 2026 — the ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society — takes place from 12 to 14 October 2026 in Malmö, Sweden. It is the leading interdisciplinary research venue that brings the technical AI community together with ethicists, social scientists, legal scholars and governance researchers, and it remains essential for anyone working on responsible AI who wants peer-reviewed substance rather than slogans. Co-sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), it treats the societal consequences of AI as a rigorous field of study in its own right.

An interdisciplinary research conference

Unlike industry summits, AIES is an academic conference organised around a competitive, peer-reviewed programme. Submissions for the 2026 edition closed in May, with author notifications in mid-July, feeding a programme of paper presentations, panels and posters. What gives the conference its distinctive seriousness is the deliberate mixing of computer scientists with researchers from outside computing — law, philosophy, economics, sociology and political science — so that claims about AI's effects are examined from multiple disciplinary angles rather than asserted. The result is a programme where a formal fairness proof, an empirical labour-market study and a legal analysis of liability can sit in the same session, each holding the others to account.

What the 2026 programme covers

The call for papers frames AIES 2026 around work that not only analyses ethical and societal challenges but helps reimagine the institutions, practices and values needed to govern AI responsibly. Topics span the conference's established core:

• Fairness, accountability and transparency, including bias and discrimination in machine-learning systems.
• AI governance and regulation, public institutions, and democracy.
• Safety, alignment and the evaluation of capable systems.
• Labour, economic and environmental impacts of AI.
• Responsibility, the philosophy and law of autonomous systems, and applications in high-stakes domains such as health.

A dedicated student track runs alongside the main programme, giving PhD researchers mentorship, financial support and a forum to present early work through lightning talks and posters — part of the conference's role in building the next generation of responsible-AI scholarship.

Why it matters in 2026

AIES grows more consequential each year as capable systems move into high-stakes use. As generative and agentic AI are deployed across hiring, healthcare, finance, media and public services, and as the EU AI Act and comparable frameworks move from text into enforcement, the questions AIES has studied for years — how to evaluate, contest and govern these systems — have become urgent and practical rather than speculative. The conference connects the people building the models to the people analysing and shaping the rules, which is exactly the bridge that AI governance and responsible-AI work require in 2026.

What distinguishes AIES from the policy panels that now appear at every industry summit is its insistence on peer review and method. Claims about algorithmic bias, automation's effect on labour, or the legitimacy of automated decision-making are presented as research to be scrutinised, replicated and contested rather than as positions to be asserted — a standard that matters all the more as responsible AI becomes a marketing term. Holding the 2026 edition in Malmö, a short hop across the bridge from Copenhagen, also situates the discussion within Europe's active regulatory environment, where the gap between what the law requires and what current systems can actually demonstrate is a pressing, concrete problem.

Who should attend

AIES is aimed at AI and machine-learning researchers working on fairness, safety and evaluation; social scientists, legal scholars and philosophers studying AI's effects; and policy professionals and practitioners responsible for governing deployed systems. PhD students will find both the main track and the student programme valuable. Because the programme is peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary, attendees come for depth and debate rather than product news — making it complementary to the industry conferences elsewhere on the calendar. Registration, the accepted-paper list and the detailed schedule are published on the official site at aies-conference.com/2026 as the programme firms up; anyone working seriously on AI ethics, AI governance or the social science of machine learning should treat it as a primary venue. For practitioners inside companies, the value is slightly different but real: AIES is where the evidence base behind responsible-AI claims is built, and tracking its accepted papers is a way to stay ahead of the standards that auditors, regulators and procurement teams will increasingly expect deployed systems to meet.