The human-optional corporation

Existing structures already let an algorithm pull a company's strings: Wyoming recognizes decentralized autonomous organizations as LLCs, the Marshall Islands gives them sovereign legal standing, and a well-known legal hack puts software in charge of a shell entity. All of them still assume a human is somewhere in the chain. Javier Milei's pitch removes the human by design. In a Financial Times op-ed, the Argentine president proposed a 'non-human corporation' run entirely by AI agents or robots, with no shareholder, owner, or director required — bundled with a promise of zero AI regulation and a low corporate tax rate, framing the whole country as one special economic zone for AI.

Limited liability is not a luxury for such entities; it is a precondition for their existence.

Two caveats matter. First, this is an op-ed, not a statute: the bill Argentina actually filed, the so-called Super RIGI, contains neither the non-human corporation nor the AI-deregulation pledge — the most radical part exists only on the page Milei signed. Second, he is pushing against a hardening trend in the other direction. Idaho and Utah recently passed laws declaring outright that AI is not a legal person.

What makes a proposal travel is the speed of the pushback. Four days after the op-ed ran, Yuval Noah Harari used the same newspaper to argue the opposite, calling legal personhood an 'all-purpose key' that would hand AI access to the financial and political system and warning of an 'AI state' that would be hard to rebel against. A head of state has now put a human-optional company on the table as a way to attract capital; the question of whether a corporation needs a person in it at all is no longer hypothetical.