Legal Personhood of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Due to an impressive evolution of the AI technologies within the last few decades it has become an integral part of everyday life called for improving and facilitating it. Yet, as a result of this evolutionary process AI’s activity nowadays contains features which require legal regulation in the course of its application.
\nSuch request was recognized by the EU legislator. In 2017, the EP voiced a possibility of introducing of a legal status of electronic person for the sufficiently sophisticated robots. Specialists in this sphere, however, gave a hostile reception to such an initiative claiming that legal personhood of AI cannot be fit into the current legal paradigm. The latest EU initiatives pertaining to the legal regulation of AI application reveal that the electronic person is not on the EU’s agenda anymore.
\nThis work is dedicated to a negation of the above claim of AI specialists by demonstrating that there are no unsurmountable obstacles for conferring legal personhood on the sufficiently sophisticated AI even though it should not be considered as a person from the philosophical standpoint.
\nHaving accepted a possibility of according legal personhood to AI, the next question to answer is should it be recognized as a natural or artificial person (the existing types) or should it be ascribed a legal status of the electronic person. The answer is found in the analysis of the determining characteristics of sufficiently sophisticated AI and their comparison with the features of humans and corporations, bearers of natural and artificial personhood, respectively.
\nThe ascription of legal personhood to AI is not aimed at recognition of exceptional qualities of AI per se. It is, instead, called for resolving the existing legal problems of AI application in the business sphere, namely, in contract and tort law, and intellectual property rights. By the way of the conferral of legal personhood on AI it is possible to properly allocate responsibility or attribute authorship.
\nIn such a manner, establishment of legal status of the electronic person is discussed as an umbrella solution for various domains of business law that may establish legal certainty and ensure the EU against legal fragmentation.