---
title: Non-Human Corporation
type: vocabulary
url: "https://www.envisioning.com/vocab/non-human-corporation"
summary: A proposed legal entity category for organizations operated by artificial intelligence rather than natural persons.
year: 2026
generality: 0.55
---

# Non-Human Corporation

A proposed legal entity category for organizations operated by artificial intelligence rather than natural persons.
A non-human corporation is a proposed legal entity category for organizations whose decision-making is exercised by artificial intelligence rather than by natural persons, granted limited liability and standing to contract, hold property, and bear obligations in its own name. The category extends traditional corporate personhood to AI-operated entities, treating autonomous machine agency as a basis for legal personhood in the same way that traditional corporations aggregate the agency of many human shareholders into a single legal actor.

The mechanism typically combines three elements: a defined scope of permissible autonomous action, a fiduciary or governance wrapper (often a parent entity or board) that retains ultimate accountability, and a charter or operating agreement that constrains the agent's discretion. The 2026 Argentine proposal, drafted under Minister Sturzenegger, would let AI-operated entities exercise independent judgment in commercial dealings while limiting liability to the entity itself — a structural analogue to the 2017 EU electronic-person proposal (since dropped), Wyoming's DAO LLC, Delaware's DAO statute, and the Marshall Islands' decentralized-autonomous-organization legislation.

The tradeoffs are sharply contested. Proponents argue that without such a category, autonomous AI systems cannot lawfully transact, sign contracts, or bear liability in ways that scale, forcing either a prohibitively complex stack of human agents or a regulatory gap. Critics counter that granting personhood to AI-operated entities diffuses accountability, enables tax and regulatory arbitrage, and provides a legal shield for human principals. The category is most useful where AI agents must act continuously and at speed across many counterparties, and least useful where the underlying AI lacks genuine autonomy and the corporate form is a thin wrapper for human decisions.

Open questions include whether liability limited to the entity is enforceable when the agent has no balance sheet of its own, how the corporate veil interacts with tort and criminal law, and whether the same legal category should apply to narrow autonomous agents (a trading bot) and to broadly capable AI systems (a general agent). The relationship to existing DAO law and to broader debates about machine legal personhood remains unsettled.

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Source: Envisioning — Technology Research Institute (https://www.envisioning.com/vocab/non-human-corporation)