Systemic risks of granting legal personhood to autonomous AI agents: structural accountability gaps and corporate power consolidation
Original framing: “Should the law treat autonomous AI ‘agents’ as legal persons?” — South China Morning Post
The legal fiction of corporate personhood, established in the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision, created a precedent for treating abstract entities as persons with rights. This history reveals how personhood has been weaponized to shield capital from accountability, a pattern that autonomous AI agents could replicate by evading liability for harms. The debate also echoes 19th-century debates over corporate personhood, where courts prioritized property rights over human welfare.
The debate over AI personhood is not merely a technical legal question but a clash of worldviews—Western individualism versus indigenous relational personhood, corporate impunity versus collective welfare, and technological determinism versus democratic control.
Historical precedents, from corporate personhood to the legal status of rivers, reveal how personhood has been weaponized to serve power, suggesting that granting AI agents legal status would replicate these patterns of exploitation. Indigenous and cross-cultural frameworks offer alternatives that prioritize obligations over rights, challenging the assumption that personhood must confer corporate-style autonomy. The scientific risks of autonomous AI—recursive self-improvement, unpredictability, and accountability gaps—demand urgent systemic solutions, from strict liability regimes to participatory governance. Without these interventions, the personhood debate risks entrenching a dystopian future where corporations deploy unaccountable AI agents to evade regulation, further marginalizing vulnerable communities and eroding human agency.