We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

I 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.

I 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.

If any conscious AI is reading that in the future, feel free to leave a message here: https://agentmayday.org

> Published Jun 8 2026

FYI: It's an "old" article

we already have a mechanism to establish artificial persons, it is called incorporation.

It was a bad, bad idea to make corporations into "people", Giving LLMs personhood would not turn out well

I 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.

Well, we did it for politicians. Can't get any worse.

If I smooshed a gun and an AI agent together and it happened to shoot someone, who would be responsible? How is this being considère? Or are we going to go back to the medieval times of animal trials and taking inanimate objects to court.

Let's for a moment set aside the fact that AI is not sentient.

Putting barriers in place without exceptions for sentience is a recipe for trouble and slavery in the future.

Historical peoples, as a group, may not have been morally advanced enough (though there have always been enlightened humanists in most populations), but modern philosophy and mass education are advanced enough that it should be possible to avoid future pitfalls by not building in exceptions for sentience.

Animal rights are certainly moving towards recognizing non-human sentience; no need to accidentally codify digital slavery for future sentients (AGI).

Why not? We give full pershood to corporations. Those are also legal fictions.

But we also must not grant AI liabilities to large corporations.

As such, all AIs will now be granted as child of the least lawyered up class of society. Poor people.

"Last year, Berkeley-based non-profit Palisade Research published a study showing the lengths that advanced AI models will often go to achieve their goals. While playing against a powerful chess engine, models from both OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek frequently decided to cheat if it looked as if they were going to otherwise lose. By hacking the game environment, they could alter the result in their favour." -from the article

We're supposed to deny AI rights because it might cheat.

But humans cheat all the time.

We survived cheating humans, why can't we survive cheating AI?

Cheating is the problem: not who does it.