Virginie Glaenzer examines whether AI could gain legal personhood like corporations do. U.S. law currently requires inventors to be natural persons, which blocked the 2020 DABUS patent application. Existing legal frameworks could adapt to grant AI certain rights, though no explicit provisions exist yet.
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[Speaker:VIRGINIE GLAENZER] I'll add some thoughts from purely a legal perspective, not from any kind of religious, philosophical, or scientific perspective, which sometimes is thought to be more neutral. In the legal system, you have the concept of, and you have sort of the provision for natural persons and juridical persons. Juridical persons can be artificial, like corporations, like anything that's not kind of naturally given this natural person status just by way of birth. And so I think that's interesting that this kind of artificiality is already built not just into Western law,, but both common and civil jurisdictions. And so that kind of got me thinking of if there's a place for corporations to be able to make political contributions and to have standing to sue, to own property, and all of these other kind of legal, status and legal rights in front of— in the law, could AI and machines have the same carve-out? And I think it's definitely worth exploring as set against some of these other ethic and morality principles that come into play, right? So if— would you be able to sanction a machine? Would you be able to give them any kind of civil penalties? Would you be able to subject them to criminal penalties and put them into jail? And then I guess the flip side of that is, at which point could you have this agency issue where the person that initially codes the machine or creates the machine is able to program them to do wrong and sort of allows them to go on and do those kind of things, and who would be responsible for that? And at that point, would you be introducing the concept of piercing the corporate veil, which you have with legal entities, so that you don't get the full limited liability shield? Would you actually go after the initial developer or coder? So those are some of the things that I'm thinking about. So ultimately, the legal system has a place for artificial beings in this construct? And would it make sense for artificial intelligence and machines to fit into that category as well? I mean, I do think so. I think that there is sort of already that provision in the law, as I mentioned earlier, which would allow for that. I mean, the current As the law stands now, particularly as far as IP rights, and there's an intellectual property clause in the Constitution that assigns ownership just to authors and inventors, it hasn't been recognized. So I think there was an application in 2020 for a patent to the USPTO. Again, strictly speaking from a US perspective, even though my native country is Ukraine, We have somewhat different opinions as well, though most of them are westernized at this point. But I think there was an application from DABUS, which— thank you, John. DABUS is the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, applied for a patent in 2020. And they were denied because the USPTO failed to recognize a named inventor. I think the US Copyright Office has followed suit as well in that. Has to be a natural person that makes the application and has the ownership of those particular IP rights. So I think, you know, that's sort of the current state of the law in the last at least 2 years. But I think that the law is a living creature as well in its own way and has, you know, some aspects of that personhood which should, you know, in theory, adapt to the needs of society. And so, To the extent that we need to make those kind of modifications and provide for those kind of carve-outs for AI, I think that that is definitely possible. But as it stands now, we don't have those kind of protections.
