NPR’s Morning Edition aired a segment today by Martin Kaste on state legislative efforts to bar legal personhood for AI. The story canvasses the looming accountability gap created by agentic AI: the Florida Attorney General’s recent investigation into ChatGPT’s role in a planned mass shooting, the European revival of Roman slave law as a possible framework, and Ohio State Representative Thad Claggett’s bill to deny AI any form of legal status. The piece includes my contribution on both sides of the question.
On the doable-now point:
“The law might very well say let’s recognize artificial intelligences as limited purpose legal persons that can sue and be sued, that can own shares, that can write checks, and so on. And that scenario could happen tomorrow if someone wanted it to.”
On the limits of present-day AI:
“They have the ability to do things, but they do not have the capacities that we associate with being a moral being, with being a person in the moral sense.”
The underlying argument is developed in Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences, 70 N.C. L. Rev. 1231 (1992).
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