Yes, they have an ethics problem.

They have no idea what ethics is --- nor do they care.

If you ask them, they will gladly regurgitate a philosophical definition from their training data.

But regurgitation is not the same as understanding.

the ethics problem isnt the agents its that we keep deploying systems that make real decisions before anyone has agreed on who owns the outcome when it goes wrong every alignment paper treats accountability as a footnote its not. nobody wants to be liable for what an autonomous system does and until that changes the ethics conversation is just noise around the actual problem.