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

And if we want these SSAs to obey law, we will have to grant them the benefits of the law as well as its burdens: property, standing, procedure. That would not make them human, but would help make them more governable.

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” for AI, so I also like to think …

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 that vehicle, the victim of ha…

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

Society may eventually find it useful to create a category of limited artificial legal personality without deciding that the entities enjoying it possess subjective experience. [...] Corporations already demonstrate that legal persons can enjoy only those rights appropriate to th…

The law has been creating artificial persons for centuries. A corporation cannot feel pain or fall in love. Yet a company is a legal person. [...] The same logic may be useful for AI. An advanced autonomous AI could be required to become an artificial legal person, with a registe…

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.

Consciousness is neither necessary nor relevant for legal status. Corporations have rights without minds. The 2016 EU parliament resolution on “electronic personhood” for autonomous robots made exactly this point – liability, not sentience, was the proposed threshold. [...] Simon…

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

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

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

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 oversight, and a novel doctrin…

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

The study advocates for establishing a new category of “electronic agents” endowed with limited rights and strict liabilities, designed to facilitate legal interactions without undermining human dignity or rights.

Yes to legal personhood, but no to limited liability.

AI agents are sophisticated enough to engage in economic transactions. Some people also grant personhood to AI in the social sense. It’s time to ask whether we should grant personhood to digital minds in the legal sense. I’ll argue that we should grant market rights and liability…

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 protections these entail.

Where these systems exercise independent judgment in unpredictable environments — as they must, if they are to be genuinely useful — their actions entail real risks. Limited liability is not a luxury for such entities; it is a precondition for their existence. Human shareholders …

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 convincing point from Harari.…

However, granting legal personhood to an autonomous sovereign AI agent creates a dangerous liability shield for operators, whereas expanding existing corporate vicarious liability offers a far more effective framework for accountability.

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

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.

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 harms. SB 1012 does exactly t…

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

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.

US law offers no legal personhood for AI systems. Every action an AI agent takes must be attributed to a human or corporate actor, even when the AI behaves unpredictably or beyond what the user or developer intended.

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 authorities.

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

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

Technical autonomy does not create legal autonomy.

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 imprison it or exact fines on i…

Some people argue for personhood for agentic AI, and then people like me ask, ‘Well, how would an AI buy liability insurance?’

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 AI could allow the humans and …

When an AI agent signs a contract, the legal responsibility lies with the human or legal entity that authorized the agent to act. The agent is not a legal person and cannot bear liability.

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

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.

But legal personhood is an all-purpose key that would also allow AIs access to our financial, economic and political systems.

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 form gave rise to powerful en…

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 us, that has perfect memory, t…

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 systems are in principle capable …

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

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 act many times faster than hum…

There is a reasonable chance, however, that if the vision for AI agents comes to pass, then for our markets and legal accountability regimes to function effectively, agents will have to have the capacity to sue and be sued directly. This is the definition of legal personhood. [..…

I support a three-year federal moratorium on granting legal personhood to AI agents while policymakers study the implications of agentic AI.

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.

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

The study concludes that extending legal personhood to AI remains premature and that adaptive governance frameworks are more appropriate for managing future AI-related legal challenges.

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 actions must not be placed outsid…

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 within governance constraints;…

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.

AI agents cannot hold citizenship or legal personhood, but they can be linked to natural persons in legally sound ways.