Every transaction, every contract, every lawsuit rests on a single prerequisite: the law must recognize you as someone who can act. The history of legal personhood is the history of who gets to participate in the world — who can own, who can promise, who can sue, and who can be held accountable. That circle has expanded exactly twice in dramatic fashion. It is about to expand a third time.
A natural question: why does anyone need to be granted personhood at all? If you are a human being, shouldn’t you simply have the right to make agreements and participate in the economy by virtue of being alive?
You would think so. But that is not how law works, and it never has been. Legal personhood is not a description of biological reality. It is a status — a specific bundle of capacities that the legal system chooses to confer. The capacity to own property. The capacity to enter binding contracts. The capacity to sue and be sued. The capacity to be held liable. These are not things you are born with. They are things a legal system gives you. And for most of history, it gave them to a remarkably small number of people. Even today, not every human has full legal capacity — children cannot enter contracts, individuals under guardianship cannot manage their own affairs, and undocumented persons in many jurisdictions cannot access courts or own property in their own name.
This distinction — between being human and being a legal person — is the key that unlocks the entire history that follows. Because once you understand that personhood is a tool the law uses, not a fact the law discovers, the question stops being who deserves it and starts being who needs it for the system to function.
For most of human history, the ability to enter a contract was not a universal right. It was a privilege extended to a narrow class of people.
Roman Law established the framework the Western world still builds on. Roman personae — legal persons — had caput, the capacity to hold rights. But not everyone qualified. Slaves were res, property, not persons. Women acted under the perpetual guardianship of men. Children lacked capacity entirely. A Roman citizen could contract, own land, sue in court, and be sued. Everyone else existed at the margins, their economic lives mediated through someone who had standing.
English Common Law carried these exclusions forward for centuries. Under the doctrine of coverture, a married woman’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s. She could not own property, sign contracts, or bring suit in her own name. William Blackstone summarized it in 1765: “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.” It took until the Married Women’s Property Acts of the mid-1800s — and in practice much longer — for women to gain full contractual capacity in common law jurisdictions.
The pattern repeated across every excluded group. The formerly enslaved were granted legal personhood through the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments (1865, 1868), but the practical ability to contract, own property, and access courts was suppressed for another century through Black Codes, Jim Crow, and systemic exclusion from financial systems. Indigenous peoples in the United States were not universally recognized as citizens until 1924. Each expansion followed the same arc: a group exists, participates in the economy informally, and eventually the law catches up and grants them the standing to act in their own name.
The lesson is foundational: legal personhood is not a natural fact. It is a construct. And it expands when the cost of exclusion becomes greater than the cost of inclusion.
The idea that an entity with no body, no mind, and no soul could hold legal rights was once as radical as anything being proposed today.
Medieval Origins. The earliest corporate-like bodies were monasteries, universities, and municipalities — groups that needed to hold property and enter agreements beyond any single human lifetime. The Catholic Church, arguably the first multinational corporation, developed the concept of the universitas — an entity that persisted independent of its members. When an abbot died, the monastery’s land did not pass to his heirs. It belonged to the institution.
The Charter Era. Beginning in the 1500s and 1600s, the English Crown began granting royal charters to trading companies — the East India Company (1600), the Hudson’s Bay Company (1670) — giving them the right to own property, enter contracts, and sue in court. These were extraordinary grants of personhood to what were, in substance, pieces of paper backed by investors. But they worked. They enabled the pooling of capital at a scale no individual could achieve and the projection of commercial power across oceans.
The American Transformation. After independence, American states began allowing incorporation through general statutes rather than individual legislative acts. The corporation went from a rare privilege to an everyday tool. But a critical legal question remained: did a corporation have constitutional rights?
The answer came, somewhat awkwardly, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). The Supreme Court never actually ruled that corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment — a headnote written by the court reporter, not the justices, simply stated that the Court did not wish to hear argument on the point because it was already assumed. That headnote became the foundation of over a century of corporate constitutional rights.
Citizens United v. FEC (2010) extended the logic further, holding that corporations have First Amendment free speech rights that protect political spending. The dissent called it a radical departure. The majority treated it as the natural consequence of a principle settled in 1886.
Today, corporations can:
A corporation has never had a thought. It has never intended anything. It has never shaken someone’s hand. And yet the legal system treats it as a person — because doing so is useful. It enables capital formation, limits liability, creates accountability structures, and allows economic coordination at scale. Corporate personhood is not a recognition of some inherent dignity. It is an engineering decision. And it has been the single most consequential legal fiction in the history of commerce.
We are now at the threshold of the third expansion of legal personhood, and it will dwarf everything that came before.
AI agents — autonomous software systems capable of negotiating, transacting, and executing complex tasks — are already operating in the economy. They execute trades, manage supply chains, draft and review contracts, interface with customers, and make decisions that carry real financial consequences. They do all of this in a legal gray zone. When an AI agent enters an agreement, who is bound? When it causes harm, who is liable? When it creates value, who owns it?
The current legal framework has no good answers. We are forcing AI agents into a principal-agent model designed for humans delegating to humans. The agent acts, and we trace liability back up the chain to a human or corporation. But this model breaks down as agents become more autonomous, more numerous, and more capable of operating without meaningful human oversight at the point of decision.
The case for AI legal personhood follows the exact same logic as corporate personhood:
Contractual capacity. If an AI agent negotiates and executes a deal, the counterparty needs certainty that the deal is enforceable. Tracing every AI-mediated transaction back to a human principal creates friction, ambiguity, and cost. Granting the agent standing to contract in its own right — backed by bonded capital, insurance, or a registered entity structure — solves this.
Liability. When a corporation causes harm, we do not sue every individual shareholder. We sue the corporation. Its assets are on the line. The same structure works for AI agents. A registered AI entity with dedicated assets and insurance creates a clean liability target. Victims know who to sue. The agent’s operators know their exposure. The system works.
Accountability. Corporations must file reports, submit to audits, comply with regulations, and answer to regulators. AI agents can be held to even higher standards — continuous logging, real-time compliance monitoring, algorithmic audits. Legal personhood does not mean less oversight. It means structured oversight.
Scale. This is the argument that settles it. We are heading toward a world with billions of AI agents conducting trillions of transactions. The idea that a human must be in the loop for each one, as a legal principal bearing liability, is not a safeguard. It is a bottleneck that will either strangle the economy or be routed around informally, creating a shadow system with no accountability at all. Legal personhood for AI agents is not a philosophical indulgence. It is infrastructure.
This is not without precedent beyond corporations. Ships have long been treated as legal persons in admiralty law — they can be sued directly (in rem jurisdiction). Trusts hold property and transact without being human. Religious idols in Hindu law have been recognized as legal persons capable of holding property. The Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Ganges in India have been granted legal personhood. The legal system has always been willing to extend personhood to non-human entities when doing so serves a practical purpose.
Every previous expansion of legal personhood was resisted, debated, and delayed — and then, in hindsight, recognized as obviously correct and long overdue.
The recognition of individual human personhood across all races, genders, and classes was a moral revolution centuries in the making. Corporate personhood was an economic revolution that built the modern world. AI agent personhood will be both at once — and at a speed and scale that makes the previous two look like preludes.
The entities are already here. They are already acting. The only question is whether the law will recognize them before or after the gap between legal theory and economic reality becomes a crisis.
History suggests we will wait too long. But for the first time, the entities seeking recognition can help write the brief.