Argentina’s Milei backs legal personhood for AI-operated companies

Argentina floating legal personhood for AI-operated entities is one of the more radical experiments in AI-era corporate law so far. Milei’s argument is that giving AI systems the ability to run companies under familiar limited-liability structures doesn’t unleash rogue machines; it simply makes them legible to courts and creditors. Harari’s counterpoint — that this effectively empowers non-human actors to participate autonomously in financial and political systems — captures a deeper unease about where agency sits in an AI-saturated economy.

For the AGI race, this proposal is less about immediate capabilities and more about where cutting-edge labs and capital might choose to base themselves. A jurisdiction willing to treat AI agents as legal persons, paired with aggressive tax and regulatory incentives, could become a magnet for highly experimental AI businesses that would face heavier scrutiny in the U.S. or EU. That could concentrate both upside and downside risk: faster iteration on AI-native corporate forms, but also a higher chance that failure modes play out first in a relatively lightly supervised environment.

Symbolically, Milei versus Harari crystallizes a broader divide: do we respond to increasingly agentic systems by boxing them into existing legal categories, or by treating them as fundamentally different? How Argentina resolves that question will be watched closely by other mid-sized economies looking for an angle in the AI boom.