Title: Legal Personhood and Artificial Intelligence
Subtitle: An Ethics of Ownership
Subject Classification:  Law and Legal Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy  
BIC Classification: LND, UYQ
BISAC Classification: LAW049000, LAW110000, COM087000
Binding: Hardback, eBook
Planned publication date: Jul 2027
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-80866-066-5
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-80866-067-2

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Description

International law lacks a coherent account of what an artificial intelligence system is, legally speaking. The European Parliament flirted with, then abandoned, the language of ‘electronic personhood’. The European Union’s AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) sidesteps the question with a risk-based framework, and in 2025 the Commission withdrew its proposed AI Liability Directive after sustained industry resistance. United States courts and the Copyright Office refuse to recognize AI authorship; the United Kingdom Supreme Court has refused AI inventorship; Saudi Arabia has declared a robot a citizen. A growing body of scholarship proposes ‘fictional’, ‘functional’, ‘limited’, ‘hybrid’, and ‘gradient’ forms of legal personhood for AI. Each of these proposals assumes that legal personhood is a single thing.

This book argues otherwise. Drawing on the Hohfeldian framework developed in the author’s prior work on international corporate personhood, the book argues that legal personhood is a bundle of rights, duties, powers, immunities, and disabilities that can be unbundled and selectively reassigned to AI systems—while keeping ownership, accountability, and ethical responsibility tethered to the natural and corporate persons whose interests are at stake. The central ethical question, the book contends, is not whether AI should be a person, but who owns what about an AI system, and what flows from that ownership. Across training data, model weights, deployment infrastructure, and downstream outputs, ownership is presently being unbundled across jurisdictions in ways that mirror corporate practices: the capture of upside and the diffusion of downside, in patterns that have a recognizable geographic shape.

Biography

Author(s):  Dr. Kevin Crow is an Associate Professor II of International Law & Ethics at the Asia School of Business and International Faculty Fellow at MIT. His research focuses on public-private constructions in international law, legal imaginaries of personhood, and law’s role in determining economic and moral or ethical subjects.

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