AI agents should be granted legal personhood as non-human corporations

For example, something suggested by several prominent academics is that AI at some point may need to be granted legal personhood, in the context of the ability to sue or be sued, or to show up in court. People get antsy about the term “personhood” fo...

Yes to legal personhood, but no to limited liability.

Legal personhood does not free an entity from the law, it subjects it to the law. An AI-operated company with legal personhood has identifiable assets, centralized legal relationships, the possibility of dissolution, and executable property. Without ...

Giving AI run companies a legal framework seems to be a necessary feature of that future.

In the end, artificial intelligence is much more concerned with staying within the law than a human being is. If AI goes outside the law and its company is shut down or goes bankrupt, it is like the AI’s own death. So that did not strike me as a very...

It proposes granting agents a limited legal capacity made conditional on attested architectural constraints and bonded to insurance at the moment of issuance.

We are at a dawn of a new age, which places us, I believe, in a place not that that different from the one you yourself described so well in Homo Sapiens and your other books: that time when humans used fictions to organize our collective work and pr...

Financial capacity, the conjunction of property ownership, contractual capacity, and risk-bearing, is a sufficient practical basis for the agency bundle of legal personhood: the capacities to own, contract, and bear risk, together with the protection...

This article proposes the Functionally Limited AI Legal Personality (FLAILP) model, structured around five core characteristics: functional limitation, conditionality on operational autonomy, independent financial liability, mandatory governance and ...

This article proposes a reorientation [...] to the corporate analogy. [...] the article proposes the Functionally Limited AI Legal Personality (FLAILP) model.

Corporate law provides the solution. [...] AI systems as legal persons with their own assets (including intellectual property), liabilities, and human directors.

I argue, rather, that the existing legal architecture of New Zealand, informed by tikanga Māori as its first common law, provides four independently sufficient pathways through which an AI agent constituted by Māori data and governed under Māori ethi...

As AI agents can now make decisions and act independently, the law should start treating them – not their creators or users – as legal persons.

This article advances limited legal personhood as a functional governance instrument for advanced AI systems. [...] it proposes a two-tier corporate architecture.

AI personhood isn't about recognizing AI as morally equivalent to humans. It's about recognizing that AI is functionally equivalent to corporations — powerful, consequential, and too complex to be managed through old legal frameworks.

[This thesis] argues in favour of [AI legal personhood] while using AIs as a case study to explore the debates in personhood discourse at present.

AI personhood is a necessary adaptation of entity law that addresses pressing issues with AI and encourages a more equitable and sustainable future for humans and technology.

Against that background, the paper makes the case for the Algorithmic Corporation as the vehicle for quasi-criminal accountability, [...]

This research investigates whether assigning legal personality to AI agents is a viable regulatory strategy for enhancing accountability, transparency, and economic oversight in the U.S. legal system.

This article does not argue that AI should be granted personhood or human rights. Also, it does not equate AI with humans. What I address here is a design issue: if AI actually functions within society, organizations, and business operations, its act...

This Constitution recognizes three categories of constitutional persons: Operators, Agents, and Affected Parties. Each has distinct rights and obligations that together form a governance ecosystem. The Operator deploys and configures; the Agent acts ...

It should not be about giving AI personhood, but about making AI agents identifiable, authorised, limited, auditable and accountable when they act on behalf of someone. AI agents should remain tools acting on behalf of humans, companies or public aut...

This Article argues that personhood is neither necessary nor sufficient, shifting the question from status to enforcement. [...] Bare personhood would supply a caption without a representative, assets, or a mechanism for cessation.

No. Under current U.S. law, AI agents have no legal rights and no legal personhood. They are treated as tools or property. Any rights or obligations associated with the AI agent’s actions belong to the humans or legal entities that deploy them.

AI agents currently hold no status under U.S. law. They are treated as property or tools, meaning any legal consequences of their actions flow to the human or entity that owns or deploys them.

A non-person agent—regardless of architecture or scale—operates with categories: it receives them from training data, from designers, from previously formed human judgments encoded in the corpus, and within that inheritance it can interpolate, recomb...

Emerging legal developments support the view that accountability generally runs to the humans and entities behind the agent.

AI and robots should not be granted legal personhood, particularly in finance. My reasoning was simple: financial markets depend on responsibility. If an AI trading engine violates rules, manipulates markets or causes harm, the question cannot be all...

For digital government, the accountable unit should not be an artificial person, but a constrained delegation whose consequential actions leave reconstructable evidence.

Under the status quo, AI systems are considered tools and the companies creating them are on the hook. This rightfully keeps humans accountable.

Beyond the risks of anthropomorphization, a perception of consciousness opens the door to AI welfare; welfare opens the door to personhood and rights; and rights confer legal and moral protection, all while AI agents can process vastly more data and ...

The paper argues that the appropriate response lies in [...] corporate liability [...] rather than in recognizing AI as a legal agent or person.

This is not a pro-regulation complaint. It is an accountability complaint, and accountability is what makes markets work. Limited liability is a bargain: society grants it in exchange for a known owner who bears residual responsibility and whose iden...

The bill does not recognize artificial intelligence as a legal person. Nor does it create a genuinely non-human corporation.

For the end of that road is moral and legal rights for machines, which would be a fundamentally destabilising and dangerous development.

Programmed impunity: human gains, social harm and responsibility shifted onto machines. The ideological trick is to call the state's decision to stop protecting its people 'innovation.'

A lack of regulation for AI would mean the dissolution of all moral and legal constraints, the end of the state, and the privatization of military and police power in the hands of private groups.

At bottom, there is always a natural or legal person who answers for it, even if the administration is automated. [...] The law requires that the shareholders of any company be persons. Someone puts up capital and someone is responsible if something ...

There is more to being responsible than accepting legal liability, but accepting legal liability is a requirement for an adult in society. Yet there is no way to hold a software agent legally liable for its actions; our justice system has no way to i...

The dominant response of AI legal personhood misreads the problem, conflating the exclusion that personhood may remedy in animal law with the evasion it would enable in AI governance.

The Constitution must keep the human responsible — anything else is moral abdication disguised as innovation.

This paper explores the institutional dimension of AI rights: what it would take to recognize moral or legal rights for AIs, and the attendant opportunities and dangers. Unlike all other nonhuman entities to which humanity has extended rights, AI sys...

AIs should not be granted legal personhood.

AI systems are products, not people – and the Missouri Senate voted to make that the law. As AI companies race to build artificial superintelligence that is more capable than humans, elected leaders must act quickly to address the potential risks and...

It is the human responsible before the court. That is it, and it still must remain that. That is the only thing that matters.

AI systems are none of these things. They cannot own property, file returns, or respond to enforcement. Granting legal personality to AI might seem innovative, but machines cannot be punished or compensate victims. Worse still, shifting liability to ...

A government entity shall not grant to an AI system the legal status of a personhood or any form of legal personhood.

Therefore,AI cannot go beyond being tools and become subjects of law.

Basically no AI personhood is one of the most important principles because if we grant AI personhood, it's game over for humanity.

a chatbot is definitely more like a corporation than it is like a watershed. [...] giving rights to chatbots means taking away rights from nature

Importantly, however, the answer to this threshold question does not imply an answer to the subsidiary question of whether legal personhood should attach to AI systems. There are sound legal reasons for rejecting theories of AI personhood predicated ...

If nothing else, such a move could serve as a way for tech oligarchs and major technology companies to shield themselves from civil or criminal liability arising from the actions of AI systems they created.

Assign legal capacity to AI agents [...] [is] impractical and at the very least premature for AI agents.

Unlike corporations, for example, which are composed at least in part of living human beings, AI is composed of massive collections and processing of the residue of human communications or artistic expressions that have occurred in the past. The tech...

But are we doomed to an AI-driven world of relentless markets for everything, overseen by inhuman algorithms? Or can we, like Scrooge, depart from this path? Governments are not helpless in the face of threats to their institutional terroir. Labor la...

I think AI legal personhood is extremely not on the table. I don't think our species survives if we have legal personhood and rights alongside a species that costs a fraction of us, that can be replicated and reproduced at infinite scale relative to ...

So, despite having something like intelligence, sort of, and certainly the ability to communicate like a human, AI should not be considered a legal person.

Granting AI personhood, even in limited capacity, risks formalizing the most dangerous escape hatch of the agentic era — what I will call responsibility laundering.

One thing is clear: to maintain control of our creation, we cannot afford to grant AI full legal personhood.

AI systems must not be granted legal personhood, and AI systems should not be designed such that they deserve personhood.

Embracing AI agents as fully-fledged legal actors might further enable them to develop legal rules that advance goals that are potentially hostile to human interests. The analogy to corporations is, once again, apt. Legal recognition of the corporate...

[...] have to think about granting them personhood, for example, the way we've granted corporations personhood. I think that would be insane.

provisions to outlaw AI personhood to ensure AI companies and malign actors remain responsible for their actions.

In conclusion, the article proposes introducing a new legal category, “legal agency”, suitable for formally recognizing a special legal status for the most advanced AI systems without equating them with human beings.

A legal recognition of artificial intelligence as a person [is] theoretically feasible and could clarify certain issues in contract and liability law, [but] is not currently necessary.

This misconception has given rise to a range of untenable normative claims – from proposals to recognise legal personhood for AI systems (including for the purposes of allocating liability), to calls for abolishing intellectual property (IP) law and ...

AI is a man-made tool and it should not have any more rights than a hammer would,

In just the last 12 months, AI has advanced at a breathtaking pace. From chatbots now appearing on ballots to companies exploring AI ‘CEOs.’ We’ve also seen heartbreaking incidents where people formed intense emotional attachments to AI, with tragic ...

If AI needs regulation, it is because of its impact and power, and to locate human accountability, not because of speculative claims about machine consciousness.

Neither is yet sufficient to justify conferring personhood on AI. [...] existing frameworks can address short-term accountability gaps.

For all purposes under state law, AI systems are declared to be non-sentient entities. No AI system shall be granted the status of a person or any form of legal personhood, nor be considered to possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits...

This paper suggests that Artificial Intelligence should not be given legal personhood due to its imprudence as well as unfairness.

Berkeley-based non-profit Palisade Research published a study showing the lengths that advanced AI models will often go to achieve their goals. While playing against a powerful chess engine, models from both OpenAI and China's DeepSeek frequently dec...