CFP: Designing and Developing Ethically Aligned Military AI Technology

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling military systems to operate in environments where uncertainty, adversarial dynamics, and time-critical decision-making are the norm rather than the exception. In such contexts, ethical design cannot rely solely on predictable scenarios, assumptions of human oversight, or static rule-based constraints; rather, it requires careful and substantial ethical programming and design to ensure that AI-enabled systems behave in alignment with moral and legal principles throughout their operational lifecycle. This conference focuses specifically on the challenge of designing and developing ethically aligned military AI technologies that can be deployed in such environments and circumstances. We invite contributions that address, among others, the following questions:

·        What methods should be used to embed robust moral constraints into particular AI-enabled systems that must act adaptively under uncertainty?

·        What technical architectures (e.g., constraint learning, formal verification, runtime monitoring) best support ethical and moral guardrails under environmental uncertainty for different military AI capabilities?

·        What fail-safe behaviors and override mechanisms should be incorporated depending on the risks-levels?

·        How should human–machine decision authority be allocated and dynamically recalibrated as operations evolve in real time?

·        How do data pipeline choices (dataset curation, adversarial robustness, bias mitigation) influence downstream ethical reliability for particular military AI decision-support systems?

·        What forms of explainability are meaningful and practical in time-critical command settings for particular military AI decision-support systems?

·        How can testing, validation, and verification frameworks account for emergent behaviors in deployment environments?

We particularly welcome contributions that explore the relationship between normative ethical principles, applied ethical solutions, and concrete engineering methods, ensuring that ethically relevant constraints are embedded from the design phase through the deployment.

Papers presented at the conference, will be considered for publication in an edited volume. Please note that acceptance to present at the conference does not guarantee publication.

This conference is organized as part of the activities of the Methodology Working Pack within the ELSA Lab Defense.

Application procedure and timeline

 Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted to Perica Jovchevski ([email protected]) by February 1, 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be communicated by March 1, 2026.

Accepted abstracts will be allocated 25 minutes for presentation and 15 minutes for discussion.

Revised conference papers (8.000-10.000 words), to be considered for publication, are due by June 30, 2026.

For further inquiries, please contact [email protected] .