The Legal Personhood of Artificial General Intelligence: A Novel Jurisprudential Framework in 2025

Abstract

This paper tackles one of the wildest questions floating around law schools and tech circles right now should we ever give artificial general intelligence legal personhood like we do with companies or even rivers. I start by digging into what personhood actually means going all the way back to Roman times and showing how courts have handed it out to weird stuff corporations ships animals that didn’t make the cut and lately nature itself. Then I split narrow AI the stuff we have today from real AGI the kind that could think learn and adapt across anything like a super smart human even if nobody agrees exactly when we’ll get there. Looking at old cases like Santa Clara that made companies “people” under the Constitution or maritime law treating a boat like it can sue you I argue personhood isn’t some sacred human only thing it’s a tool courts use when it solves problems (Banteka, 2021; Lovell, 2023). The big contribution here is my own framework a step by step test courts or lawmakers could actually use to decide if a particular AGI deserves personhood and if so exactly how much because it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. I lay out five tough criteria general intelligence real autonomy some kind of self awareness ability to carry rights AND duties plus a clear reason why personhood helps society more than it hurts. Any AGI that passes would get limited personhood maybe just for contracts and liability never voting or marrying and always with humans watching over it. I wrestle with the scary counterarguments like what if this waters down real human rights or lets tech bros hide behind their robots but I think the safeguards I built in fix most of that. By the end you’ll see why rushing to say yes or no is dumb we need this middle path ready for when AGI actually shows up because pretending the question doesn’t exist won’t make it go away (Chesterman, 2021; Kurki, 2019).