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We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
61–70 of 122 posts
Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
#62I can't read the article due to the paywall, but why is the author worried about this? If there's anybody out there arguing that "AI agents" should be given legal personhood, I imagine they're a pretty small group. Any congressperson pushing something like this would be commiting political suicide.
Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
But will the courts see it that way. We already see that it is difficult to hold any human in Waymo responsible when their cars fail to obey traffic regulations.
A human at Waymo would likely not be found responsible, except if actual negligence or intent could be traced to that person. Waymo the corporation would be responsible, if their vehicles caused damage or injury. For traffic violations, presumably they could be fined, or even their permission to operate could be revoked if there are persistent problems.
For an example of how that plays out with a malicious corporation, look up how much Fed Ex and UPS pay in parking fines/tickets in NYC.
Urban myth is that a previous version of the ticket paperwork required that the vehicle manufacturer be accurately filled in, and this was one of the reasons for UPS trucks being so plain/unmarked, and since that could not be derived from the (lack of) badging or the registration paperwork (which version for trucks did not have the matching entry requirement), UPS didn't have to pay tickets while other services did.
Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
#64we already have a mechanism to establish artificial persons, it is called incorporation.
A corporation always has a human owner, who can be punished if the corporation commits severe crimes. An embodied AI with legal personhood has no such means of making it behave, because it can make arbitrarily many hidden copies of itself, so it doesn't need to care if one copy is killed or jailed.
Chance would be a fine thing. The modern corporation is a vehicle for the distribution/evasion of criminal and often civil liability, let's not pretend otherwise.
Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
A human at Waymo would likely not be found responsible, except if actual negligence or intent could be traced to that person. Waymo the corporation would be responsible, if their vehicles caused damage or injury. For traffic violations, presumably they could be fined, or even their permission to operate could be revoked if there are persistent problems.
For an example of how that plays out with a malicious corporation, look up how much Fed Ex and UPS pay in parking fines/tickets in NYC. Urban myth is that a previous version of the ticket paperwork required that the vehicle manufacturer be accurately filled in, and this was one of the reasons for UPS trucks being so plain/unmarked, and since that could not be derived from the (lack of) badging or the registration pap…
UPS trucks are custom-built for UPS, and they are destroyed at EOL, not sold off. So, safe to assume any UPS truck you see is owned and operated by UPS.
Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
#66I would only start to entertain this when we had AI running for reasonably long period say a year with same full context. That is in same run over a year it had collected information. In singular session.
No point even considering it if it can't run for extended periods. And actually keeping learning during the duration. As surely person should stay alive for decades if allowed.
Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
#67I hadn't even considered it, and we're in a much bigger mess than I'd thought if people are seriously discussing the idea. People really don't understand these things.
No one understands these things, which is why considering machine consciousness as a possibility is entirely reasonable. People who have a shallow model of how they work ("it's just linear algebra!") betray a lack of understanding.
What are you talking about. No. obviously it's not suddenly reasonable.
I don't understand orbital mechanics, therefore, believing that the sun orbits the earth is entirely reasonable.
Listen to yourself.
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Okay I've checked your comment history. Yea. Might be self-serving to argue for personhood of LLMs.
Can we _please_ do something about this?
Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in a rural area and have only seen a Waymo a few times when travelling for work. Does Waymo require the user to have a driver's license? If they did, and get agreement of responsibility, that's one thing, but generally if not wouldn't it be Waymo's responsibility for bad programming or broken devices?
They don’t need a license and you are not supposed to touch the controls, so I don’t really see how you would be responsible. Waymos do seem to break traffic laws every once in a while, and I always wonder if mine will get pulled over and what will happen there.
I always assumed this was negotiated ahead of time with the county where they are operating, and police officers educated on what to do.
Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
#69It was a bad, bad idea to make corporations into "people", Giving LLMs personhood would not turn out well
Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
#70> Published Jun 8 2026
FYI: It's an "old" article