we 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.
Corporations were created specifically to dilute and diminish the liability of the owners. If those same owners can further reduce liability by passing on to AI agents, then they absolutely will.