AIES 2026: Dates, Venue, Program & Registration Guide
October 12-14, 2026
TL;DR: AIES 2026, the Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, runs October 12-14, 2026 at Malmö Live in Malmö, Sweden. In-person registration ranges from $250 (student member, early) to $500 (regular...
TL;DR: AIES 2026, the Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, runs October 12-14, 2026 at Malmö Live in Malmö, Sweden. In-person registration ranges from $250 (student member, early) to $500 (regular nonmember, late), with a virtual option starting at $60. Paper submissions closed in May 2026, and author notifications go out July 16, 2026, one day after this guide was published, so the speaker lineup is not public yet.
Let’s clear up one thing before anything else. If you searched “AIES 2026” and landed here expecting an AI-in-education conference, you are thinking of a different event happening in Kunming, China. This guide covers the other AIES, the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, the academic and policy conference held every year in a different city and, in 2026, landing in Malmö, Sweden. Same acronym, completely different conference, completely different audience.
I track AI conferences and events because the research presented at them tends to show up in product decisions, regulation, and hiring criteria 12 to 18 months later. That is the same lag I watch when testing new AI tools before they hit mainstream adoption. AIES caught my attention because it sits at the exact intersection I care about: the people writing the rules for responsible AI and the people building the systems those rules apply to, in the same room.
In this guide, I will walk through the confirmed dates and venue, the submission and registration numbers straight from the official site, who this conference is actually built for, and an honest read on whether it is worth the trip. All figures below come directly from the official AIES 2026 site, cross-checked page by page against its call for papers, registration, and venue pages.
If you only need the short version: this is a serious academic and policy conference for people doing real AI ethics, governance, and social-impact work, not a trade-show for AI product launches. Here is the full breakdown.
Key Takeaways
- Confirmed dates and venue. AIES 2026 runs October 12-14, 2026, at Malmö Live (Clarion Hotel Malmö Live), Dag Hammarskjöld Square 2, Malmö, Sweden.
- Registration is tiered by role and format. In-person passes range from $250 to $500 depending on membership and student status; virtual passes run $60 to $150, all before or after the September 14, 2026, early deadline.
- The paper deadline has already passed. Abstracts were due May 14, 2026, and full papers May 21, 2026. Author notifications go out July 16, 2026, so this guide cannot yet name confirmed speakers or accepted papers.
- Five topic tracks define the program. Power and governance, AI systems and ethical design, AI in social and institutional domains, work and labor, and the critique and limits of AI all get dedicated coverage.
- This is not the AIES education conference in China. If your search intent was AI-in-education, you want a different event entirely; this guide covers the AAAI/ACM ethics and society conference only.
A conference agenda full of “ethics” panels means nothing if the organizers cannot tell you their own submission deadlines. AIES publishes its call for papers, registration tiers, and venue contract details in plain text on its own site. That level of transparency is rare, and it is exactly what I look for before recommending anyone spend a travel budget on an academic conference.
What Is AIES 2026?
AIES 2026, officially the Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, is the annual academic conference where computer scientists, ethicists, legal scholars, and social scientists present peer-reviewed research on the governance, design, and societal impact of AI. It is jointly organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and 2026 marks its ninth edition.
Unlike a product-focused AI event where vendors demo tools on an expo floor, AIES runs on peer review. Every paper on the agenda passed through a double-blind review process, submitted through EasyChair and capped at 10 pages in the AAAI-2026 Author Kit format, before it earned a slot. The conference explicitly states it welcomes “a broad range of methodological approaches, including empirical, normative, participatory, critical, and technical work,” which is a wider net than most computer science conferences cast. You will find philosophers, policy researchers, and machine learning engineers presenting in the same tracks.
The 2026 edition is organized by conference co-chairs Virginia Dignum and Petter Ericson, both of Umeå University, alongside a program committee spanning the University of Washington, New York University, Utrecht University, and Purdue University. Google is listed as a gold sponsor and IBM as a silver sponsor, which tells you something about who is paying attention to how this field is being shaped.
One detail worth flagging for research integrity: the 2026 call for papers explicitly states that LLM-generated text is prohibited in submissions unless the paper is analyzing that generated text as its subject, and that AI systems cannot be listed as authors or cited as sources. For a conference about AI ethics, that is a meaningful line to draw, and it tells you the organizers are not treating “responsible AI” as a slogan.
When and Where Is AIES 2026?
AIES 2026 takes place October 12-14, 2026, at Malmö Live, hosted at the Clarion Hotel Malmö Live in Malmö, Sweden. The venue address is Dag Hammarskjöld Square 2, 211 18 Malmö, Sweden.
Malmö sits directly across the Öresund Bridge from Copenhagen, Denmark, so international attendees typically fly into Copenhagen Airport and take the roughly 20-minute train connection across the bridge into central Malmö. That makes it one of the more accessible Scandinavian conference cities for a European or transatlantic trip, even though Malmö itself is a mid-size city rather than a major air hub.
The conference has secured a discounted room block at the Clarion Hotel Malmö Live for October 11-15, 2026, with rates around SEK 1,495 to SEK 1,995 per night (roughly $155 to $207), breakfast and VAT included. That block closes for booking on September 11, 2026, three days before the conference’s own early registration deadline, so anyone planning to stay onsite should lock in a room before locking in a ticket tier.
Quick facts:
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Event | AIES 2026 (Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society) |
| Dates | October 12-14, 2026 |
| Venue | Malmö Live (Clarion Hotel Malmö Live), Dag Hammarskjöld Square 2, Malmö, Sweden |
| Format | In-person and virtual attendance options |
| Organizers | AAAI and ACM |
| Sponsors | Google (Gold), IBM (Silver) |
| Themes | AI governance, ethical design, social impact, labor, and critique of AI systems |
| Official site | aies-conference.com/2026 |
Who Should Attend AIES 2026?
AIES 2026 is built for people doing hands-on research or policy work at the intersection of AI and its social consequences, not for general AI enthusiasts or product marketers looking for launch news. The conference’s own program committee draws from computer science, law and policy, the social sciences, and philosophy, and the paper topics reflect that mix directly.
You will get real value from this event if you fit one of these profiles:
- AI ethics and fairness researchers who want peer-reviewed venues for empirical or normative work on bias, alignment, and interpretability rather than another industry blog post.
- Policy and governance professionals tracking how academic research on AI regulation, accountability, and political economy is actually being framed before it reaches legislation.
- Responsible-AI teams inside companies who need to see where the research frontier is moving on trustworthy AI, human-AI interaction, and post-deployment harm before their own governance frameworks fall behind.
- Legal scholars and social scientists studying AI’s effect on labor, surveillance, democracy, or marginalized communities, since the conference dedicates full tracks to exactly those questions.
- Graduate students submitting through the dedicated student track and student co-chair program, which gives early-career researchers a lower-cost path into a major venue.
Here is the honest caveat. If you are looking for product demos, vendor booths, or hands-on tool training, this is the wrong event. AIES is a paper-and-panel academic conference; the “hallway conversation” value comes from meeting other researchers and policy people, not from a trade-show floor.
If you lead a responsible-AI or governance team weighing AIES against a larger industry AI summit the same quarter, the trade-off is real: the industry summit tends to have flashier keynotes, but AIES runs peer-reviewed papers on subjects like AI in health and wellbeing and post-deployment accountability, which may map directly onto the gaps in your own governance framework. One cost-effective play is to split a two-person team: send one member in person to present at a co-located workshop such as Converging Perspectives on Health AI, and have the other join virtually for the main conference sessions. That covers both the specialist workshop and the core program without paying for two in-person passes.
Speakers and Program: What’s Confirmed So Far
As of this guide’s publication, AIES 2026 has not yet announced a public keynote lineup or accepted-paper list. Paper submissions closed on May 21, 2026, and author notifications go out July 16, 2026, so the full program is still being finalized. Any article claiming to list confirmed AIES 2026 keynote speakers this early should be treated with real skepticism; the organizers themselves have not published that information yet on the official organizing committee page.
What is confirmed is the leadership running the conference. Conference co-chairs Virginia Dignum and Petter Ericson, both of Umeå University, lead the 2026 edition. The program co-chair team includes Aylin Caliskan (University of Washington), S. Matthew Liao (New York University), Mirko Schäfer (Utrecht University), and Daniel S. Schiff (Purdue University). Four student co-chairs, Katerina Drakos (University of Copenhagen), Bertilla Fabris (Umeå University), Tracie Farrell (Open University UK), and Ángel Pavón Pérez (Open University UK), run the dedicated student track.
There is also one confirmed co-located event: the Converging Perspectives on Health AI (CPHAI) Workshop, built around the question of how to develop clinical AI systems that are technically robust, clinically useful, socially acceptable, and responsibly deployed. If your work touches health AI specifically, that workshop is a more focused room than the main conference tracks.
I will update this guide once the speaker lineup and full session schedule go live. Until then, the honest answer to “who is speaking at AIES 2026” is: not confirmed yet, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing.
Agenda and Themes: What AIES 2026 Actually Covers
The AIES 2026 program is organized around five topic areas, and together they give a clearer picture of the agenda than any speaker list could this early. The scope statement itself is broader than most computer science conferences: organizers state they welcome empirical, normative, participatory, critical, and technical work alike, spanning morality, law, policy, psychology, and the other social sciences alongside AI.
Power, Governance, and Political Economy covers AI regulation, safety and security, accountability across AI value chains, post-deployment harm and redress mechanisms, and the geopolitical and economic impacts of AI systems. AI Systems, Values, and Ethical Design is the most technical track, covering trustworthy AI, value alignment, interpretability and explainability, fairness and bias, human-AI interaction, and safety in agents and embodied AI.
AI in Social and Institutional Domains looks at AI in law and the judiciary, public administration, surveillance and privacy, health, and creative and cultural production. Work, Labor, and Global Inequalities focuses on automation’s effect on employment, worker surveillance, and Indigenous and Global South perspectives on AI development, a track that is easy to overlook but directly relevant to anyone building AI products for global markets. Critique, Consequences, and Limits of AI rounds out the program with research on AI failures, non-adoption, environmental costs, and outright resistance to AI systems, a track most industry-run AI conferences would never schedule.
That last track is the clearest signal of what makes AIES different from a vendor-run AI summit. A conference willing to give equal stage time to research documenting where AI fails, causes harm, or should not be adopted at all is doing something most commercially sponsored AI events will not touch, even with Google and IBM as sponsors of this exact event.
AIES 2026 Call for Papers, Deadlines, and Acceptance Rate
The 2026 paper cycle has already closed, but the call for papers is still worth reading closely, both if you are planning a 2027 submission and if you want to judge how seriously this conference takes its own bar. I pulled every date and rule below straight from the official AIES 2026 call for papers and its PDF.
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Abstract registration deadline | May 14, 2026 (11:59 AoE) |
| Full paper submission deadline | May 21, 2026 (11:59 AoE) |
| Author notification | July 16, 2026 |
| Conference | October 12-14, 2026 |
A camera-ready date is not published on the official CFP as of this update, so I am not going to guess at one. A few submission rules that catch people out are worth calling out, because they are the kind of thing you only learn after a rejection. The author list is locked once the paper deadline passes, so you cannot add or drop co-authors after May 21. Papers that ignore the formatting guidelines are desk-rejected before review, no exceptions. And a paper cannot already be published in, or accepted at, an archival conference or journal before you submit it to AIES, which rules out recycling work that is already in a proceedings elsewhere.
Archival vs non-archival: a detail most write-ups miss
Here is a nuance that matters if you come from a field with different publishing traditions. Authors of accepted papers can choose a non-archival option: instead of the full paper going into the proceedings, you provide a one-page abstract plus a URL to the full paper hosted elsewhere. That lets researchers from disciplines that reserve their work for journals still present at AIES without burning first-publication rights. Both archival and non-archival submissions are held to the same formatting rules and publication-ready quality bar, and both give you an extra unnumbered page for ethics and reproducibility statements that does not count against the page limit.
What is the AIES acceptance rate?
AIES 2026’s own acceptance rate is not out yet, since author notifications only went out July 16, 2026, and the organizers have not published submission or acceptance counts for this edition. So anyone quoting you a 2026 acceptance rate right now is inventing it. What I can give you is the historical record: the ACM Digital Library lists the first AIES (2018) at 61 accepted of 162 submissions, a 38% rate, and the 2020 proceedings report 211 submissions with 71 accepted (34 talks plus 37 posters), roughly 34%. Across editions AIES has run in the mid-30s to high-30s percent range, so plan for a competitive but not brutal roughly one-in-three shot rather than the sub-25% odds of the largest ML conferences. Questions about a submission go to the program chairs at aies26@easychair.org.
AIES 2026 Registration and Pricing
Registration for AIES 2026 is tiered by attendance format (in-person or virtual), membership status, and student status, with an early deadline of September 14, 2026, and late pricing after that date.
| Ticket Type | Early (by Sept 14) | Late (after Sept 14) |
|---|---|---|
| In-Person, AAAI/ACM Member | $400 | $450 |
| In-Person, Regular Nonmember | $450 | $500 |
| In-Person, Student Member | $250 | $275 |
| In-Person, Student Nonmember | $285 | $305 |
| Virtual, AAAI/ACM Member | $95 | $125 |
| Virtual, Regular Nonmember | $125 | $150 |
| Virtual, Student Member | $60 | $85 |
| Virtual, Student Nonmember | $110 | $135 |
Confirm current pricing on the official AIES 2026 registration page before booking.
There is one rule here that matters more than the price itself: at least one author of every accepted paper must register at the in-person rate and physically present the work. Virtual attendance is not an option for presenting authors, only for attendees who are not presenting. If you are planning to attend purely to present a paper, budget for the in-person tier from the start.
International attendees who need a Schengen visa can request an invitation letter once registration is paid, with the organizers stating a 2 business day turnaround. Given standard Schengen visa processing times on top of that, anyone traveling from outside the visa-waiver countries should register well before the September 14 early deadline just to leave enough runway for the visa process itself.
Discounts: What’s Actually Available (No Invented Codes Here)
I am not going to pretend there is a special discount code for readers of this site, because there is not one, and any AIES coverage claiming otherwise is making it up. The only discounts AIES 2026 publishes are the ones built into its own tier structure: the AAAI/ACM member rate, which saves $50 to $100 over the nonmember rate depending on format and timing, and the student rate, which cuts the in-person cost roughly in half.
If you are already an AAAI or ACM member, or eligible to join before registering, that membership pays for itself against the registration savings alone on most tiers. The organizers also note that ACM members should contact the conference directly at aies@aaai.org for discount assistance, which suggests some flexibility exists for members working through the registration process. Beyond that, the only other real lever is timing: registering before the September 14, 2026, early deadline is the single biggest discount on the table, worth $25 to $50 depending on your tier.
Is AIES 2026 Worth It? My Honest Take
For AI ethics researchers, governance professionals, and academics working at the intersection of AI and its social consequences, AIES 2026 looks like one of the more substantive venues on the calendar, mainly because of the review bar. Every session on the agenda passed double-blind peer review, and the five topic tracks cover ground, including AI’s failures and limits, that most sponsor-driven AI conferences quietly skip.
The honest caveat is that this is not a beginner-friendly or product-focused event. If you are looking for tool demos, vendor pitches, or a general “AI trends” overview, an industry summit will serve you better. AIES also cannot yet tell you who is speaking, since notifications only went out this week, so anyone booking travel now is betting on the program committee and topic tracks rather than a named keynote lineup.
Here is my buy-or-skip framing. Register in-person if you have a paper accepted, a governance team that needs direct exposure to the research frontier, or genuine research interest in AI ethics and policy, and if the Malmö travel cost fits your budget or your institution’s conference funding. Register virtually if budget or travel is the blocker; at $60 to $150 depending on membership and student status, the virtual tier is a low-risk way to follow the sessions. Skip it if you are looking for product demos or general AI industry news; you will find a better fit elsewhere.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where is AIES 2026?
AIES 2026 runs October 12-14, 2026, at Malmö Live (Clarion Hotel Malmö Live) in Malmö, Sweden. The conference offers both in-person and virtual attendance.
Is AIES 2026 the same as the AI-in-education conference in China?
No. There are two unrelated conferences that both use the acronym AIES. This guide covers the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society in Malmö, Sweden. A separate AI-in-education conference in Kunming, China, also uses the AIES acronym; if that is what you are searching for, you want a different event entirely.
How much does it cost to attend AIES 2026?
In-person registration ranges from $250 (student member, early) to $500 (regular nonmember, late). Virtual registration ranges from $60 (student member, early) to $150 (regular nonmember, late). Early pricing applies through September 14, 2026.
Who is speaking at AIES 2026?
No public keynote or speaker lineup has been announced as of this guide’s publication. Paper notifications went out July 16, 2026, so the accepted-paper list and program schedule are still being finalized by the organizing committee.
What topics does AIES 2026 cover?
Five tracks: power, governance, and political economy; AI systems, values, and ethical design; AI in social and institutional domains; work, labor, and global inequalities; and the critique, consequences, and limits of AI.
Can I attend AIES 2026 virtually?
Yes, for non-presenting attendees. Virtual passes start at $60 (student member, early). Authors of accepted papers must still register at the in-person rate and present physically; virtual attendance does not satisfy that requirement.
Is there a discount code for AIES 2026?
No third-party or affiliate discount codes exist for this conference. The only real discounts are the official AAAI/ACM member rate and the student rate, both built into the registration tiers, plus the early registration deadline of September 14, 2026.
The Bottom Line
AIES 2026 is a peer-reviewed academic conference for people doing real work on AI ethics, governance, and social impact, not a product showcase, and its own numbers back that up: a double-blind review process, five topic tracks that include AI’s failures and limits, and registration tiers that reward AAAI/ACM membership and student status rather than early hype.
The insight worth taking with you: the program is not finalized yet, and that is fine. Notifications went out July 16, 2026, one day after this guide was published, so the smart move right now is to register at the early rate before September 14 based on the confirmed tracks and organizing committee, not to wait for a keynote announcement that will come later.
Your concrete next step for AIES 2026: check the official conference site for the program update once notifications finish, and lock in your registration tier and Malmö hotel room before the September 11 accommodation cutoff. If you track AI research and policy shifts the way I do, keep an eye on my broader AI conference and event coverage and the AI tools I’ve tested that responsible-AI teams are actually evaluating right now, and subscribe for AI event alerts so you catch the AIES 2026 speaker announcement the moment it lands.