The ethics of artificial intelligence covers a broad range of topics within AI that are considered to have particular ethical stakes. This includes algorithmic biases, fairness, automated decision-making, accountability, privacy, and regulation. It also covers various emerging or potential future challenges such as machine ethics (how to make machines that behave ethically), lethal autonomous weapon systems, arms race dynamics, AI safety and alignment, technological unemployment, AI-enabled misinformation, how to treat certain AI systems if they have a moral status (AI welfare and rights), artificial superintelligence and existential risks.

Some application areas may also have particularly important ethical implications, like healthcare, education, criminal justice, or the military.

Machine ethics (or machine morality) is the field of research concerned with designing Artificial Moral Agents (AMAs), robots or artificially intelligent computers that behave morally or as though moral. To account for the nature of these agents, it has been suggested to consider certain philosophical ideas, like the standard characterizations of agency, rational agency, moral agency, and artificial agency, which are related to the concept of AMAs.

There are discussions on creating tests to see if an AI is capable of making ethical decisions. Alan Winfield concludes that the Turing test is flawed and the requirement for an AI to pass the test is too low. A proposed alternative test is one called the Ethical Turing Test, which would improve on the current test by having multiple judges decide if the AI's decision is ethical or unethical. Neuromorphic AI could be one way to create morally capable robots, as it aims to process information similarly to humans, nonlinearly and with millions of interconnected artificial neurons. Similarly, whole-brain emulation (scanning a brain and simulating it on digital hardware) could also in principle lead to human-like robots, thus capable of moral actions. And large language models are capable of approximating human moral judgments. Inevitably, this raises the question of the environment in which such robots would learn about the world and whose morality they would inherit – or if they end up developing human 'weaknesses' as well: selfishness, pro-survival attitudes, inconsistency, scale insensitivity, etc.

In Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen conclude that attempts to teach robots right from wrong will likely advance understanding of human ethics by motivating humans to address gaps in modern normative theory and by providing a platform for experimental investigation. As one example, it has introduced normative ethicists to the controversial issue of which specific learning algorithms to use in machines. For simple decisions, Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky have argued that decision trees (such as ID3) are more transparent than neural networks and genetic algorithms, while Chris Santos-Lang argued in favor of machine learning on the grounds that the norms of any age must be allowed to change and that natural failure to fully satisfy these particular norms has been essential in making humans less vulnerable to criminal "hackers".

The term "robot ethics" (sometimes "roboethics") refers to the morality of how humans design, construct, use and treat robots. Robot ethics intersect with the ethics of AI. Robots are physical machines whereas AI can also be entirely software. Not all robots function through AI systems and not all AI systems are robots. Robot ethics considers how machines may be used to harm or benefit humans, their impact on individual autonomy, and their effects on social justice.

"Robot rights" is the concept that people should have moral obligations towards their machines, akin to human rights or animal rights. It has been suggested that robot rights (such as a right to exist and perform its own mission) could be linked to robot duty to serve humanity, analogous to linking human rights with human duties before society. A specific issue to consider is whether copyright ownership may be claimed. The issue has been considered by the Institute for the Future and by the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry.

In October 2017, the android Sophia was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia, though some considered this to be more of a publicity stunt than a meaningful legal recognition. Some saw this gesture as openly denigrating of human rights and the rule of law.