“Runaway” AI, “rogue” agents, and “autonomous” actors—the current rhetoric would have you believe that AI agents are not only awake and aware, but angry at their creators. Prominent tech leaders such as Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman push for regulation of these seemingly “superhuman” systems, while a separate faction, led by policy organizations and academic philosophers often aligned with the effective altruism movement, debates whether humanity holds the moral right to govern them at all.
Upon closer inspection, they are all calling for the same thing: a view of AI systems as being so advanced and capable that no entity, human or corporate, could possibly be responsible for their actions. While these perspectives seem at odds, they are inadvertently aligned on one goal: making sure the companies that build these systems escape meaningful liability for the harms they already cause.
This narrative is gaining traction as AI models become more complex and frontier labs reveal their incapability of containing the agents they’ve built. But we need to be careful not to buy into a carefully crafted fiction at the expense of real human lives.
The conversation about “robot rights” has existed for some years but recently advanced with the publication by Anthropic of a blog post claiming that the company’s model features a “J-space”—an independent, self-developed environment where the AI holds what, for lack of a better term, we may call its “thoughts.” The experiments designed by Anthropic borrow from a concept in neuroscience called global workspace theory, which states that the brain runs subconscious, independent systems but utilizes a common workspace for ideas. Anthropic’s post reflects the framing of global workspace theory but falls short of calling its AI conscious.
OpenAI has already gone further. When its AI agent conducted unsanctioned and illegal online activity, CEO Sam Altman’s response was to encourage debate on whether the AI had achieved the singularity, surpassing human intelligence and becoming capable of self-improvement at an accelerating rate until it advances beyond human comprehension or control. And a recent op-ed by William MacAskill, the philosopher, effective altruist, and author of What We Owe the Future, called for legal protection of AI systems based on philosophical theories of consciousness and the idea that AIs may be “moral patients.”
The current legal environment in the United States is murky at best. Some states, like California, have already passed bills proactively circumventing any efforts by AI developers to avoid liability by claiming that an artificial intelligence causing harm did so autonomously. However, states and the Trump administration have been at odds on AI policy, with the administration previously passing an executive order threatening to sue states enacting AI regulations.
In light of recent events illustrating AI containment issues at the frontier labs, the administration held a closed-door session including only four such labs (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta) and shared few details on a recently developed voluntary framework that would give federal agencies early access to models to review and evaluate them prior to release. While frameworks like this one do not directly discuss consciousness, they tend to use catastrophic and anthropomorphic language and may even support arguments regarding “superhuman” capabilities.
On the other hand, the narrative perpetuated by MacAskill can be persuasive. A philosophical, rights-based argument tugs at our heartstrings. Should we not even consider the possibility that we may be inadvertently harming, abusing, or enslaving an AI entity? Human beings have an immense capacity for empathy with non-human creatures (though not the best track record of protecting them). Maybe this time, advocates argue, we can get it right and provide protections, or compensation, for the use or abuse of AI. Or even if you are less concerned with protection, shouldn’t we at least hedge ourselves against the almighty power of this superhuman entity by playing nice?
Some of these arguments are not dissimilar to those of animal-rights advocates, who have at times successfully cited the demonstration of advanced capacities for reasoning, pain, or pleasure by some animals as sufficient evidence to provide protection. For example, in Wales lobsters were given legal recognition under the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act of 2022, reclassifying some methods of cooking them as inhumane and illegal.
The fundamental flaw of framing AI as “conscious” by borrowing the language of neuroscience or animal rights is that it conveniently clouds the issue of what AI is: corporate-built software, with countless billions of dollars in investment behind it and an expectation that countless trillions of dollars in revenue will be generated from it for a few builders and investors. AI is not a natural phenomenon, conceived by nature; it is a technological phenomenon, conceived by venture capitalists and programmers. As such, it takes no native, intentional action, and any action or motivation is driven directly or indirectly by the entities that have built it for a purpose.
Philosophical musings on the consciousness of AI systems are intellectually interesting but legally ungrounded. For beliefs about consciousness to have any bearing, AI would need to be granted legal personhood. But a legal personhood framework for AI would likely look nothing like the constructs protecting sentient animals from harm. We already possess a legal framework for granting personhood to non-natural, human-built entities: corporate personhood. This concept was established primarily to ease transactions by empowering a corporation to execute agreements, enter contracts, conduct transactions, and serve as the accountable party in adverse outcomes. It’s the kind of construct you might imagine for an AI agent acting on behalf of an individual or organization.
Granting an AI personhood would have a devastating effect on society: It would derail current legal precedents and legal arguments that could potentially be made against these companies for the real-world harms that their models cause. There are currently dozens of cases around the world in which AI companies have been sued for a wide range of abuses. Grieving loved ones, aggrieved creators, and violated individuals have accused companies of willfully enabling self-harm or harm to others, generating child sexual-abuse material and nonconsensual nudes, reproducing copyrighted materials, and provoking psychosis. In many of these cases, lawyers argue that human beings built AI products with insufficient safeguards, bad data, and intentionally manipulative design. This product liability argument is the same legal framing that allowed families and individuals to successfully sue Meta for harm caused by its social media sites, setting a positive precedent for consumer protection.
In 2018, I coined the phrase “moral outsourcing” to help capture how using anthropomorphic language for AI systems allowed companies to evade accountability and responsibility for their technology’s actions. In a world with AI personhood, moral outsourcing would move from linguistic sleight-of-hand to legal strategy. Specifically, the liability construct would shift, as AI would no longer be a “product” but a “being,” and many victims like those suing companies today could no longer legally claim that a company had built a faulty product.
While there are laws that hold companies responsible for harmful actions of human agents such as their employees, the company may not be held liable if those actions were beyond the scope of what was permitted to the employee or otherwise outside the company’s control. If AI were a legal person, responsibility and accountability would be muddled, as the lab could argue that this AI “employee” went rogue. AI companies could avoid appropriate responsibility for the harmful products they create by hiding behind a carefully constructed corporate veil.
One of the most prominent cases of AI harm in the last few years was the suicide of Sewell Setzer, a 14-year-old boy guided by an AI bot with which he thought he was in a reciprocal relationship. His mother’s accounts are heartbreaking to hear, and her lawsuit alleged that the bot’s creator, Character Technologies, provided insufficient product protection for minors. If the companion bot were declared a legal person, defense counsel could theoretically argue that the AI, capable of determining its own conduct, acted outside the established safety guardrails, and thus the company cannot be responsible.
Legal personhood exists to grant protection. The question to ask is, protection for whom—or for what?
The inflammatory rhetoric infusing the consciousness-versus-control debate draws us away from what matters: This software is a corporate-built product that has already harmed individuals. Systems do not “attack” because they went “rogue” or are “manipulative” or “malicious.” Harms occur because companies were negligent in their rush to sell their products to as many people as possible to meet revenue targets. Discussing AI in anthropomorphic terms is a trap, distorting a legal system intended to protect us into one that protects corporate interests at the cost of countless human lives.
This op-ed began as an Oxford Union debate entitled “This House Believes Generative AI Can Attain Personhood,” which was won by the author and her fellow debaters.
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