Frank Fagan (South Texas College of Law Houston), Stakeholder Personhood and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford Intersections: AI and Society (forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Legal personhood has long functioned as a tool for settling high-stakes conflicts in corporate organization, immigration, environmental protection, and political representation, and its allocation has consistently reflected the power and preferences of affected stakeholders. This article brings that institutional dynamic to debates over artificial intelligence by treating AI personhood not as a declaration of intrinsic status, but as a governance choice that reallocates responsibility. Personhood operates as an architecture for assigning liability and creating regulatory sightlines, and extending it to AI would reshape the strategic incentives of developers, insurers, regulators, victims, and moral advocates in divergent ways. Viewed through this stakeholder perspective, the article examines how these incentive shifts would alter the behavior of those who design, deploy, and oversee autonomous systems, and compares personhood’s governance effects to those of existing legal tools. The analysis shows that the practical significance of AI personhood lies not in symbolic recognition, but in how it reorganizes institutional relationships and redistributes responsibility across actors.
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