With the explosive growth of data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the traditional cloud computing model by transferring all data to the cloud for processing has gradually failed to meet the real‐time requirement of IoT services due to high network latency. Edge computing (EC) as a new computing paradigm shifts the data processing from the cloud to the edge nodes (ENs), greatly improving the Quality of Service (QoS) for those IoT applications with low‐latency requirements. However, compared to other endpoint devices such as smartphones or computers, distributed ENs are more vulnerable to attacks for restricted computing resources and storage. In the context that security and privacy preservation have become urgent issues for EC, great progress in artificial intelligence (AI) opens many possible windows to address the security challenges. The powerful learning ability of AI enables the system to identify malicious attacks more accurately and efficiently. Meanwhile, to a certain extent, transferring model parameters instead of raw data avoids privacy leakage. In this paper, a comprehensive survey of the contribution of AI to the IoT security in EC is presented. First, the research status and some basic definitions are introduced. Next, the IoT service framework with EC is discussed. The survey of privacy preservation and blockchain for edge‐enabled IoT services with AI is then presented. In the end, the open issues and challenges on the application of AI in IoT services based on EC are discussed.