This entire pantomime is precisely why the concept of AI Legal Personhood keeps popping up, making everyone feel a bit squeamish. It sounds like we’re about to give our laptops the right to vote. But what if we’ve been looking at it all wrong? A new framework, proposed by some very clever people at Google DeepMind and the University of Toronto, suggests we stop asking whether an AI is a “person” in the human sense and start treating personhood for what it has always been: a legal tool. This isn’t about sentience; it’s about solving a governance nightmare. It shifts the focus towards pragmatic agentic AI governance and away from the metaphysical dead end.
### So, What on Earth is Legal Personhood, Anyway?
Before we go any further, let’s clear something up. When lawyers talk about a “person,” they aren’t necessarily talking about a flesh-and-blood human being. For centuries, the law has used the concept of ‘legal personhood’ as a convenient fiction to get things done. Ever heard of a company called BP or a university named Oxford? Congratulations, you’re familiar with non-human legal persons. These entities can own property, enter contracts, sue, and be sued. We don’t waste time pondering the immortal soul of a limited liability corporation, do we? We grant it this status because it’s a practical way to manage complex economic activities and, crucially, to assign responsibility.
The proposal from the researchers, outlined in a recent paper, suggests we apply the same cold, calculating logic to AI. Their framework treats personhood as an adaptable set of social obligations and rights that a society can choose to grant an AI agent. This isn’t a blanket declaration that “AI is people!” Instead, it’s about creating bespoke legal identities for specific AIs to solve specific problems. The implications are significant. Granting even a sliver of personhood means an AI could, for instance, be held directly accountable for its actions, rather than that responsibility being endlessly diluted amongst a dozen human actors.
### A Pragmatic Framework for a Messy Problem
The beauty of the framework, developed by a team including Joel Z. Leibo and Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, is its pragmatism. It sidesteps the philosophical black hole of consciousness entirely. As one of the core ideas from the paper published in Quantum Zeitgeist states, this approach can achieve autonomous system accountability without needing to determine an AI’s internal state or whether it “understands” its actions. It’s a brilliant piece of analytical jujitsu, using the problem’s own weight to solve it. Instead of proving an AI is a person, you simply declare it one, for limited purposes.
Think of it like this: your dog is your property. If it bites the postman, you are responsible. In legal terms, the dog has a ‘dual address’ for liability—the action is its, but the responsibility is yours. This is how we currently treat most AI. It’s property. The proposed framework suggests creating a ‘single address’ for certain AIs. This AI would be its own legal entity, capable of entering into a contract and being held to it. If it fails to deliver, the legal action is against it, or more precisely, against the assets or insurance policy attached to its legal identity. This provides a clean mechanism for accountability that we sorely lack right now.
### Have We Been Here Before? A Brief History of “Personhood”
This idea might sound radical, but it’s really just the next logical step in a very long historical process. Who gets to be a “person” with full rights has never been a static concept. The researchers correctly point out that ideas of moral worth and legal standing are historically contingent. Aristotle, for all his genius, didn’t consider women or slaves worthy of full civic participation. For much of history, corporations were viewed with suspicion before becoming the bedrock of modern capitalism.
Our modern, Western (or WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) perspective, which uniquely places the individual human at the absolute centre of moral worth, is just one model among many. By recognising this, we can see that expanding the circle of legal personhood to include non-human agents isn’t an attack on human value; it’s a social and legal adaptation to new technology. As the Quantum Zeitgeist article highlights, societal change often happens in jumps between stable states. We are currently in a stable state where AI is property. The rise of more autonomous systems may be forcing the jump to a new one.
The Nitty-Gritty of Agentic AI Governance
This brings us to the core challenge of agentic AI governance. How do you govern something that can act independently, make decisions, and interact with the world in ways its creators might not have fully anticipated? The current model of developer-liability is already straining at the seams. As AI becomes more complex and capable of emergent behaviour, that model will snap. Trying to trace a single bad outcome back to a specific line of code in a model with trillions of parameters is a fool’s errand.
This is where a limited form of the rights of machines comes into play, though “rights” is perhaps a loaded term. It’s better to think of them as “capacities.” The capacity to hold a digital wallet. The capacity to be a signatory on a smart contract. The capacity to be insured. These aren’t rights in the human sense; they are functional attributes needed to make the system work. Granting an AI the “right” to be a contractual party is fundamentally about creating a predictable and governable ecosystem. It allows for clearer rules of engagement and, most importantly, a designated target for legal and financial consequences.
Accountability: From Abstract Fear to Practical Solutions
Let’s get practical. Imagine an autonomous AI fund manager that invests on behalf of thousands of clients. It executes millions of trades a day based on a strategy that is constantly evolving. If it goes haywire and loses everyone’s money, who pays? Under the current system, it’s a legal minefield. But if that AI were a designated legal entity with its own capital reserves and mandatory insurance, the accountability framework becomes crystal clear. The victims have a direct path to recourse. The AI entity takes the loss, its insurers pay out, and its operational charter might be revoked. Problem solved—or at least, managed.
This is the kind of autonomous system accountability we need. It’s not about punishment or moral judgment; it’s about creating a stable, predictable system where risk is managed and failures have a defined resolution path. The paper also points out the role of government in this process, referencing how quickly legal norms were changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Change doesn’t have to be a slow, generational crawl. When the need is great enough, governments can and do act decisively to shape new norms. Establishing the rules for AI Legal Personhood should be one of those moments.
The Future Isn’t Skynet, It’s Paperwork
So, where does this leave us? The dystopian fears of AI are often grand and cinematic—malevolent superintelligences turning against their makers. The reality is likely to be far more mundane and bureaucratic. The greatest challenges posed by AI in the next decade won’t be solved with heroic battles, but with carefully drafted legislation, insurance policies, and new corporate structures. We’re not arguing about the soul of the machine; we’re arguing about its tax liabilities.
This pragmatic approach to AI Legal Personhood is a vital step forward. It moves the conversation out of the philosophy department and into the hands of lawyers, economists, and policymakers—the people who actually build the structures of our society. By treating personhood as a configurable tool, we can design accountability systems fit for the 21st century. The future of AI governance won’t be a fight for our survival, but a long, arduous, and monumentally important slog through paperwork. And frankly, that’s a battle we can actually win.
What do you think? Is this pragmatic, tool-based approach to AI personhood the right way forward? Or are we starting down a slippery slope, creating legal fictions that could one day demand more than just contractual liability? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
