AI legal personhood
The legal question of whether an AI system can hold rights, enter contracts, or bear liability — and what that means for who is responsible when it acts.
Legal personhood is what lets an entity sue, own property, sign contracts, and be held liable. Corporations have had it for centuries; humans hold it by birth. The question for AI is whether a system that acts autonomously in the world — placing orders, hiring, disposing of assets — needs its own legal standing, or whether liability can always be traced back to a human owner. The hard part is that diffuse ownership and opaque decision-making can make that trace genuinely ambiguous, which is where law and engineering collide.
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The first AI encyclical
Pope Leo XIV gave artificial intelligence the Catholic Church's highest teaching genre — an encyclical — and used 42,000 words to demand that governments regulate the labs and never let a machine make a killing decision.
The human-optional corporation
In a signed Financial Times op-ed, Argentina's president proposed a corporate form with no human shareholder, owner, or director required — a company owned and run entirely by AI agents.
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