AI Agents And Legal Personality: Rethinking Legal Personhood In The Age Of Autonomous Artificial Intelligence
- IJLLR Journal
- 1 day ago
- 1 min read
Shweta, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.
ABSTRACT
The rapid development of autonomous artificial intelligence (“AI”) agents is challenging traditional assumptions about agency, responsibility, and legal personality. Unlike conventional software, increasingly sophisticated AI agents can interpret objectives, formulate plans, interact with external systems, make decisions, and perform actions with limited or delayed human intervention. This development raises a fundamental legal question: should highly autonomous AI agents continue to be treated merely as objects or tools of human actors, or should the law recognise them as a distinct category of legal entity? This article examines the concept of legal personality through jurisprudential theories and compares the emerging position of AI with established artificial persons such as corporations and juristic entities. It argues that autonomy alone does not justify granting AI full legal personality. Nevertheless, the increasing independence of AI agents exposes an accountability gap that cannot always be satisfactorily resolved through conventional doctrines of agency, negligence, contract, and product liability. The article therefore proposes a limited and functional model of AI legal personality for highly autonomous systems, subject to registration, traceability, human oversight, financial responsibility, and continuing liability of developers and deployers. Such recognition should not confer human rights or moral personhood upon AI. Rather, it should operate as a regulatory mechanism for allocating rights, duties, and liabilities in circumstances where autonomous AI performs legally significant activities.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; AI Agents; Legal Personality; Juristic Personality; Autonomous Systems; Liability; AI Regulation; Legal Personhood.
