Best Paper Award at AIES 2026 for Benjamin Lange

MCML PI Benjamin Lange received the Best Paper Award for Law and Policy at the Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2026).

In his paper “AI Alignment and Fiduciary Obligation,” Lange examines how AI assistants should be aligned as they take on a growing range of roles for users, from advice and decision support to learning, emotional support, and companionship. Rather than focusing only on the relationship between users and AI systems, the paper considers the developer, who controls a system’s behavior, memory, and engagement settings. Drawing on business ethics and legal scholarship, Lange argues that fiduciary theory applies to extended AI assistant deployment. He shows how the four classic fiduciary duties of loyalty, care, good faith, and candor can serve as alignment criteria for the relationship between developers and users. He links each duty to a specific risk users face and outlines the institutional measures that follow from it.

Congratulations on this recognition!