ICML 2026 Workshop

Philosophy of AI in the Era of Large Language Models

Workshop Introduction

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) raise pressing conceptual and practical questions that intersect with longstanding debates in philosophy, cognitive science, and AI safety. As these systems increasingly exhibit behaviors associated with reasoning, communication, and decision-making, they compel a reexamination of foundational concepts such as knowledge, intentionality, agency, and consciousness—ideas once thought unique to biological minds.

At the same time, LLMs open new avenues for studying cognition from the outside in: as in silico model organisms, they enable controlled investigations into learning, abstraction, and generalization as things-in-themselves. This workshop will bring together a diverse group of participants from philosophy, computer science, cognitive science, political theory, and related fields to foster rigorous interdisciplinary dialogue.

Invited Speakers

All confirmed and presenting in person. Seven experts bringing diverse perspectives from philosophy, cognitive science, and AI.

Staff Research Scientist and philosopher at Google. Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London. Co-led Google's first empirical study on machine sentience.

Geoff Keeling

Google

Chair Professor of Philosophy at HKU. Co-directs the AI & Humanity Lab. Author of "Making AI Intelligible" and the forthcoming "Going Whole Hog: A Philosophical Defense of AI Cognition."

Herman Cappelen

University of Hong Kong

Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Pioneer in interpretable machine learning and human-AI collaboration. General Chair for ICLR 2024.

Been Kim

Google DeepMind

Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Philosophy and Ethics of AI at FAU. President of the European Society for Cognitive Systems. Organizes the PhAI conference series.

Vincent C. Müller

FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Professor of Philosophy of Language at UCL. Expert in epistemology and philosophy of language with recent focus on LLMs and implications for philosophy of mind.

Daniel Rothschild

University College London

Assistant Professor at Harvard in the Kempner Institute and Computer Science. Research focuses on generative models, world models, and embodied agents.

Yilun Du

Harvard University

Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oxford. AI2050 Fellow (Schmidt Sciences). Research on foundational questions about capacities and limitations of deep neural networks.

Raphaël Millière

University of Oxford

View All Speaker Details

Workshop Submission Information

📄

Paper Types

We welcome both theoretical and empirical submissions. Theoretical papers should demonstrate strong philosophical merit, while empirical papers must clearly articulate implications for philosophical issues.

📏