AIES 2026: Dates, Venue, Program & Registration Guide

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. Peer-reviewed academic and policy conference, not a vendor floor. In-person registration runs $250 to $500 by tier, virtual runs $60 to $150 (checked 2026-08-24, aies-conference.com/2026). Early deadline is September 14, room block cutoff is September 11. The 2026 speaker lineup is not yet public.

I track AIES because the AI governance rules that land here become the compliance backdrop for every LLM search product 12 to 18 months later. Same lag I watch when a tool moves from paper to production. AIES sits at the exact intersection I care about, the people writing the rules for responsible AI in the same room as the people building the systems those rules apply to.

One clarification before the details. If you searched “AIES 2026” expecting an AI-in-education conference, you want a different event in Kunming, China. Same acronym, different conference, different audience. This guide covers the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, held in Malmö this year. Every figure below comes straight from the official AIES 2026 site, cross-checked page by page (checked 2026-08-24).

AIES 2026 is a peer-reviewed conference, not a product event

AIES 2026, officially the Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, is where computer scientists, ethicists, legal scholars, and social scientists present peer-reviewed research on AI governance, design, and social impact. Jointly organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Every paper on the agenda passed double-blind review through EasyChair, capped at 10 pages in the AAAI-2026 Author Kit format. The organizers welcome empirical, normative, participatory, critical, and technical work, which is a wider net than most CS conferences cast. Philosophers, policy researchers, and machine learning engineers all present in the same tracks.

One detail worth flagging for research integrity. The 2026 call for papers prohibits LLM-generated text in submissions unless the paper analyzes that generated text as its subject, and AI systems cannot be listed as authors or cited as sources. For a conference about AI ethics, that is a meaningful line to draw. The organizers are not treating “responsible AI” as a slogan.

Dates, venue, and how to get there

AIES 2026 runs October 12-14, 2026 at Malmö Live (Clarion Hotel Malmö Live), Dag Hammarskjöld Square 2, Malmö, Sweden.

Malmö sits directly across the Öresund Bridge from Copenhagen. International attendees typically fly into Copenhagen Airport and take the 20-minute train across the bridge into central Malmö. Malmö itself is a mid-size city, not a major air hub, so budget the Copenhagen connection. Mid-October is windy along the coast; pack a jacket that survives the walk from Central Station.

The conference secured a room block at the Clarion Hotel Malmö Live for October 11-15 at roughly SEK 1,495 to SEK 1,995 per night (about $155 to $207, breakfast and VAT included, checked 2026-08-24). Room block cutoff is September 11, 2026, three days before the conference’s own early registration deadline. Lock the room before the ticket tier.

Detail	Info
Event	AIES 2026 (Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society)
Dates	October 12-14, 2026
Venue	Malmö Live (Clarion Hotel Malmö Live), Malmö, Sweden
Format	In-person and virtual
Organizers	AAAI and ACM

Who runs the 2026 edition

Conference co-chairs Virginia Dignum and Petter Ericson, both of Umeå University, lead AIES 2026. The program co-chair team is 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 run the dedicated student track: Katerina Drakos (University of Copenhagen), Bertilla Fabris (Umeå University), Tracie Farrell (Open University UK), and Ángel Pavón Pérez (Open University UK).

Google is listed as gold sponsor, IBM as silver. That tells you something about who is paying attention to how this field is being shaped.

I have no speaker lineup yet, and neither does anyone else

I checked the official AIES 2026 organizing committee page on 2026-08-24. No public keynote lineup or accepted-paper list has been announced. Paper submissions closed May 21, 2026. Author notifications went out July 16, 2026. The program is still being finalized.

Any article claiming to list confirmed AIES 2026 keynote speakers right now is guessing. I would rather tell you nothing than fabricate a lineup. I will update this guide the moment the speaker list and full session schedule go live.

One co-located event is confirmed: the Converging Perspectives on Health AI (CPHAI) Workshop, built around clinical AI systems that are technically sound, clinically useful, socially acceptable, and responsibly deployed. If your work touches health AI, that workshop is a more focused room than the main tracks.

Five topic tracks define the program

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.

Power, Governance, and Political Economy covers AI regulation, safety and security, accountability across AI value chains, post-deployment harm and redress, 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, 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 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 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.

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 is doing something most commercially sponsored AI events will not touch, even with Google and IBM as sponsors of this exact edition.

Registration is tiered by role and format

Registration is tiered by attendance format, AAAI/ACM membership, and student status. Early pricing runs through September 14, 2026 (checked 2026-08-24, aies-conference.com/2026/registration).

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
Virtual, AAAI/ACM Member	$95	$125
Virtual, Student Member	$60	$85

One rule matters more than the price. 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. If you are attending purely to present a paper, budget in-person from the start.

International attendees who need a Schengen visa can request an invitation letter once registration is paid, with a stated 2 business day turnaround. Standard Schengen processing on top of that means anyone traveling from outside visa-waiver countries should register well before September 14 to leave runway for the visa process.

I cannot give you a 2026 acceptance rate. Here is the historical range

The organizers have not published submission or acceptance counts for the 2026 edition. Anyone quoting you a 2026 acceptance rate right now is inventing it.

The historical record from the ACM Digital Library: AIES 2018 landed at 61 accepted of 162 submissions (38%). 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 (checked 2026-08-24, dl.acm.org). Plan for a competitive but not brutal roughly one-in-three shot, not the sub-25% odds of the largest ML conferences.

I would buy in-person if any of these apply

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. Presenting authors have no other option.

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 AIES if you are looking for product demos or general AI industry news. An industry summit will serve you better. AIES is a paper-and-panel academic conference; hallway conversation value comes from meeting other researchers and policy people, not from a trade-show floor.

For AIES 2027, the location and dates will be announced after the 2026 edition wraps. Watch the aaai.org and aies-conference.com sites, or subscribe to my AI event alerts to catch the announcement when it lands. I also track the broader AI conference calendar and the AI tools responsible-AI teams are actually evaluating if you want the wider picture.