Abstract: This article critically considers whether legal personhood can be extended to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Legal personhood has traditionally been conferred on non-human objects like corporations, idols, and rivers for functional or symbolic reasons, but AI poses distinctive jurisprudential challenges because of its autonomy, capacity to make decisions, and unpredictability. The paper develops theoretical foundations—fiction theory, realist theory, and functionalist theory—to conclude whether AI can be granted full, partial, or quasi-personhood. It examines international case law, and the South African path, as well as Indian judicial precedents of corporate and non-human personhood. A comparative review of policy approaches in the EU, US, and India identifies gaps in governing AI liability, accountability, and intellectual property. The argument in the paper is that although full personhood for AI is premature, a model of quasi-personhood—limited recognition for liability, contracts, and IP—balances innovation and accountability. It recommends that India must follow a functional approach to AI personhood, infusing accountability, transparency, and human intervention into any given legal framework.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Legal Personhood, Algorithms, Liability, Jurisprudence, Quasi-Personhood.
- Introduction
The concept of legal personhood has never been as structured as it might sound. Human beings still remain its dominant subjects, but history shows that the law has “personized” several non-human entities for purely practical, ethical, or convenience reasons. To put it another way: Corporations are considered persons under the law — not because they are persons, but because their status as legal persons makes them easier to govern and hold accountable and to engage commercially. Rivers, forests, and ecosystems as natural resourcesnever-before-heard-of arena in the 21st century: algorithms and artificial intelligence. AI systems challenge basic assumptions of legal personhood, unlike natural things that are in the process of being recognized for ecological or cultural reasons. Their actions, decisions, and even “learning” make them responsible to an extent, even if they come no closer to being organic or spiritual beings because of it. The consequences of a self-learning algorithm driving a self-driving car, denying a loan, or recommending political content are no fable; they are reality, and completely inacceptable have an immediate effect on the prospects, rights and lives of people. And if that’s what the law is about when it comes to holding people responsible for decisions made by complex systems that are so convoluted that even their creators can’t necessarily explain how they came up with particular results, whom should we hold responsible?
The question of whether AI can be a person pushes jurisprudence into completely unknown territory. Granting algorithms legal personhood risks upending traditional human-focused concepts of rights, obligations and moral agency, but it also could offer helpful, if imperfect solutions for liability and regulation. In the future, AI might operate largely independently, perhaps at levels where it’s impossible to say who is actor and who is instrument, not the case with corporations, which are ultimately beholden to humans. where rivers symbolize environmental ethics and common heritage, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to symbolize human intellectuality but it is not totally controlled by human. These differences illustrate why the question is not just whether AI can have legal personality, but also whether the law is prepared to mutate in ways that do not conserve its primary classifications.
Consequently, the change from rivers to algorithms is not only a change in how law must adapt to rapidly changing worlds, but also a stretching of legal imagination. We are thus compelled to ask whether legal person is a shield for human dignity or a servant of convenience through the lens of history but also stray away from it and shift toward the side of a complex society compelled whether it is something to be adapted for the convenience and need of a technologically advanced society