Philip Maymin (Fairfield University – Charles F. Dolan School of Business) has posted Financial Personhood on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The prospect of artificial general intelligence raises urgent questions about the standing of artificial agents. These questions are often run together under the single heading of personhood. This paper begins by separating them: legal personhood is a divisible bundle of capacities and protections, while moral patiency, the status of having interests that matter in themselves, is a distinct question that may turn on sentience. I argue that financial capacity, the conjunction of property ownership, contractual capacity, and risk-bearing, is a sufficient practical basis for the agency bundle of legal personhood: the capacities to own, contract, and bear risk, together with the protections these entail. The central contribution is the financial Turing test: an AI attains financial personhood when a human voluntarily invests in it as a counterparty rather than purchasing it as a tool, staking resources on the AI’s autonomous performance with the AI itself as the obligor. Investment is a costly, decentralized signal of acknowledged agency, grounded in revealed preference and costly signaling. Historical precedent, from corporate personhood to compensated emancipation, shows financial practice generating legal recognition rather than awaiting it. Financial personhood neither requires nor purports to establish sentience-based moral patiency. What it delivers is enforceable standing under deep uncertainty about machine minds, and contractarian obligations between humans and the artificial agents they choose to treat as counterparties.
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