When it comes to AI adoption in language pedagogy, AI ethical literacy plays a pioneering role by addressing the potential risks and challenges associated with AI use. Meanwhile, teaching style determines how teachers design instruction, interact with learners, and adopt new tools. It may significantly affect how they interpret, evaluate, and integrate AI technologies in pedagogical practices. Therefore, the extent to which English teachers’ teaching styles are influenced by their AI literacy and AI ethical literacy has received limited scholarly attention. To fill this gap, in this study, 103 Iranian EFL teachers with different teaching styles, including lecture-based, interactive and discussion-oriented, project-based, game and activity-oriented, and problem-solving, were scrutinized. To do so, an explanatory sequential mixed methods design was adopted to design and develop an AI-based questionnaire to statistically measure the teachers’ ethical AI literacy and its relationship with teaching style. The data provided clear evidence (p < .05) of the explicit relationship between English teachers’ ethical AI literacy and their teaching styles. Subsequently, by conducting semi-structured interviews with 5 teachers from the same population, the findings revealed that different teaching approaches afforded different pedagogical roles for AI. Finally, these findings can be useful for teacher education programs to improve teachers’ AI ethical literacy across diverse teaching styles.