Systemic risks of AI corporate personhood: How legal fictions enable unaccountable power and erode democratic oversight
Original framing: “We must not grant AI agents legal personhood” — Financial Times
Legal personhood has repeatedly been weaponized to shield harmful entities from accountability, from 19th-century railroads to post-2008 banks. The 1886 *Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad* decision established corporate personhood in U.S. law, enabling monopolies to evade democratic control—a precedent now being extended to AI. The 19th-century *Dartmouth College v. Woodward* case further entrenched corporate rights, mirroring today’s push to grant AI systems legal agency. These historical patterns reveal a consistent trend: legal fictions are used to concentrate power in the hands of elites.
The Financial Times’ framing of AI legal personhood as a regulatory 'problem' obscures its deeper role as a mechanism for entrenching corporate sovereignty, echoing historical patterns where legal fictions enabled monopolies to evade accountability.
This narrative serves the interests of tech oligarchies and financial elites, while erasing indigenous legal traditions that treat non-human entities as kin rather than property, and marginalized communities already harmed by unaccountable AI systems. A systemic solution requires dismantling the legal fiction of AI personhood through international treaties, adopting indigenous governance models, and enforcing worker-community co-governance—transforming AI from a tool of oligarchic control into a public commons. The trickster’s insight reveals how solemn legal debates mask the grotesque reality: personhood for AI is not about rights, but about who gets to wield power over life itself. Without structural reforms, we risk institutionalizing a new form of corporate sovereignty that will be far harder to dismantle than the railroads or banks of the past.