The more AI agents are deployed in scenarios with possibly unexpected situations, the more they need to be flexible, adaptive, and creative in achieving the goal we have given them. So, a certain level of freedom to choose the best path to the goal is inherent in making AI robust and flexible enough for the real-world. At the same time, however, the pervasive deployment of AI in our life, whether AI is autonomous or collaborating with humans, raises several ethical challenges. AI agents should be aware of and follow appropriate ethical principles and should thus exhibit properties such as fairness or other virtues. These ethical principles should define the boundaries of AI’s freedom and creativity. In this talk I will introduce the notion of ethically bounded AI, showing several examples where the absence of such boundaries led to undesired paths to achieve the given goal.