Facing the new demand of regional integrated economic construction along the Yellow River and insufficient innovative impetus in ecological civilization, artificial intelligence, as an important engine driving the new round of technological wave and new quality productivity, is of great significance for promoting the coordinated integration of the social economic system and the ecosystem and achieving innovative development in key national ecological function areas. This paper takes the seven major urban agglomerations along the Yellow River as an example to empirically study the impact of AI on ecological technological innovation and its spatial spillover effects. The results show that: (1) Artificial intelligence significantly improves the ecological technology innovation of urban agglomerations in the Yellow River Basin, and the results are still valid after a series of robustness tests. (2) Artificial intelligence mainly achieves this through improving capital allocation efficiency and ecological environment resilience, and its promoting effect on ecological technological innovation is more significant in key environmental protection cities, cities in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River and large cities. (3) The spatial spillover effect of artificial intelligence on ecological technology innovation in urban agglomerations in the Yellow River Basin shows an inverted U-shaped correlation, in which producer services agglomeration and industrial collaborative agglomeration play a positive moderating role. The research conclusions provide theoretical basis and empirical evidence for how artificial intelligence can enable ecological innovation value in major strategic regions of the country.