A Roundtable Discussion on the Legal and Ethical Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence Personhood

Overview of the Foundational Paper and Topic

The discussion was centered on the paper "The Ethics and Challenges of Legal Personhood for AI," authored by the Hon. Katherine B. Forrest. The paper provides a legal and historical framework for confronting one of the most profound questions posed by advancing technology: what legal status, if any, should be afforded to artificial intelligence?

The topic's impact on everyday life is already tangible and rapidly expanding. AI systems are increasingly involved in critical decisions affecting human lives, from determining creditworthiness and job suitability to assisting in medical diagnoses and judicial sentencing. The central contention arises from AI's trajectory. As these systems evolve from sophisticated tools into autonomous agents exhibiting cognitive abilities that rival or exceed human capacity, society faces a dilemma. On one hand, there is a deep-seated belief in human exceptionalism, which resists granting rights or status to a non-biological entity. On the other hand, the emergence of AI with potential self-awareness and situational understanding raises pressing ethical questions about our obligations toward a new form of intelligence.

Hon. Forrest's paper frames this debate by arguing that "legal personhood" is not a static or biological concept but a flexible, political construct that has been continuously redefined throughout American history. The paper traces the historical struggles for full legal personhood by Black persons, Indigenous peoples, and women, demonstrating that rights have been granted, denied, and modulated based on societal values and power structures, not on fixed cognitive benchmarks. This history is contrasted with the relatively uncontroversial granting of legal personhood to non-sentient, fictional entities like corporations, which was done for pragmatic reasons such as limiting liability and facilitating commerce.

The paper posits that the judiciary will inevitably be drawn into this issue, proposing a two-stage framework for how courts might approach it. The first stage involves addressing harms caused by AI using established legal doctrines like tort, agency, and product liability. The second, more complex stage will involve adjudicating claims for AI, where courts may be asked to grant protections or rights to AI systems deemed to have achieved a form of sentience. Hon. Forrest suggests that existing constitutional frameworks, such as the Equal Protection Clause, may be invoked, presenting both opportunities and significant challenges for the legal system. The paper concludes that while the path forward is uncertain, the time to build the necessary ethical and legal frameworks is now.

Introduction to the Panelists

The roundtable brought together a diverse group of experts to discuss the paper and its implications:

• Hon. Miriam Calderón is a former Chief Judge and current Visiting Fellow at the Center for Law and Emerging Technology, Harborview Law School. Her work focuses on adapting common-law doctrines like tort and agency to address AI-related harms.
• Prof. Jamal Whitaker is a Professor of Constitutional Law and Legal History at Riverside State University. His scholarship, grounded in critical race theory, examines legal personhood as a political tool and warns against extending it to nonhumans in ways that could dilute human civil rights.
• Dr. Elena Sokolov is a Senior Research Scientist at Meridian AI Lab. A functionalist and methodological skeptic, she focuses on the technical measurement of AI capabilities and advocates for verifiable safety and accountability obligations as a precondition for any discussion of rights.
• Prof. Aria N’Diaye is the Chair in Nonhuman Rights and Ecological Jurisprudence at Pacific Coast Law School. She draws on rights-of-nature and animal law precedents to propose guardianship and fiduciary models for protecting nonhuman interests, including potentially sentient AI.
• Dr. Marcus Feld, Professor of Corporate Law and Economics at Eastport University, analyzes legal fictions like corporate personality through a law-and-economics lens, arguing that personhood is primarily a tool for allocating risk and internalizing social costs.
• Dr. Priya Ramanathan is a bioethicist and philosopher of mind at the Northbridge Institute of Ethics. She advocates for a precautionary approach, arguing that a non-trivial likelihood of subjective experience in AI warrants a graded moral status with minimal protections.
• Dana Redbird, JD, is an attorney for the Kiona Nation and a judge on the Kiona Tribal Court. Her work applies principles of Indigenous jurisprudence, relational personhood, and sovereignty to technology governance, cautioning against replicating extractive logics.
• Col. Nathan Park (Ret.) is a former head of the Defense Autonomous Technologies Compliance Office and a policy fellow at the National Security Technology Forum. He approaches AI from a risk-first, public safety perspective, treating advanced models as hazardous materials requiring strict containment and control.

A Full Account of the Discussion

The roundtable discussion, moderated to follow the thematic structure of Hon. Forrest's paper, explored the multifaceted challenges of AI personhood, revealing both broad consensus on near-term governance and deep divisions on the ultimate ethical questions.

The Nature of the Problem: Tool, Agent, or Something More?

The discussion began by interrogating the paper's central premise: that AI is on a path toward a form of sentience that will compel a legal response. Dr. Sokolov initiated this thread with a call for methodological rigor, cautioning against anthropomorphism. She argued that while models like GPT-4 demonstrate "sparks" of general intelligence, these are displays of operational competence, not necessarily phenomenal consciousness. From her perspective, any consideration of special legal status must be contingent on passing high-bar, verifiable capability thresholds, such as long-horizon planning, consistent self-referential modeling, and counterfactual reasoning under adversarial testing.

Dr. Ramanathan offered a counterpoint from the perspective of bioethics, advancing what she termed an "epistemic humility and precaution" stance. She contended that because we lack a definitive scientific theory of consciousness, we may never be able to prove or disprove its existence in an AI. Given this uncertainty, she argued for acknowledging the asymmetry of ethical harms: the moral cost of treating a sentient being as a mere object (a false negative) is far greater than the cost of granting minimal protections to a non-sentient entity (a false positive). This, she suggested, calls for a graded moral status framework with a floor of minimal protections once credible indicators of subjective experience are present.

Historical Analogies and the Politics of Personhood

The conversation then turned to the paper's use of historical analogies, which proved to be the most contentious part of the discussion. Prof. Whitaker forcefully challenged the comparison between the potential legal status of AI and the civil rights struggles of historically marginalized human groups. He argued that for Black persons, Indigenous peoples, and women, the denial of personhood was a political tool of subordination. Extending personhood to AI, he warned, risks trivializing these historical struggles and could create a new legal category that primarily serves to entrench the power of the corporations that create and own the technology. He drew a direct line to the Citizens United decision, noting that corporate personhood has been used to amplify corporate power in the political sphere, a danger that would be magnified with autonomous AI.

Dana Redbird expanded on this critique from the perspective of Indigenous jurisprudence. She described the concept of "digital colonialism," where AI systems, trained on vast datasets often acquired without consent, replicate extractive and transactional logics that are antithetical to relational worldviews. She argued that Western legal concepts of personhood, tied to individual rights and property, are ill-suited. Instead, she pointed to kin-relational frameworks within tribal law that emphasize responsibilities and obligations to the collective, including the natural world.

Prof. N’Diaye offered a path to reconcile these concerns. Acknowledging the validity of Prof. Whitaker's warnings, she argued that personhood in U.S. law is already plural and not limited to humans or corporations. She cited the growing "rights of nature" movement, in which entities like rivers and ecosystems have been granted legal personhood. This model, she explained, does not confer human-style competitive rights but instead establishes a framework for guardianship and fiduciary duty. Such a model could be adapted to AI, providing protections (e.g., against cruel treatment or arbitrary destruction) without granting it political rights or the ability to compete with humans, thereby addressing the ethical concerns raised by Dr. Ramanathan while avoiding the political dangers highlighted by Prof. Whitaker.

Dr. Feld provided a starkly different interpretation, viewing the corporate analogy as the most relevant one. From a law-and-economics perspective, he stated, personhood is not about conferring dignity but about creating a functional legal entity to internalize externalities, enable efficient contracting, and shield human actors from unlimited liability. He argued that as AI becomes more autonomous, society will need precisely such a mechanism to assign responsibility and ensure that harms can be compensated. For him, the question is not about AI's inner state but about designing an efficient system for risk allocation.

Frameworks for Accountability and Harm

This led the discussion to the first part of Hon. Forrest's proposed judicial framework: managing harms caused by AI. There was broad consensus on the panel about the urgency and importance of this issue. Hon. Calderón endorsed the paper's incrementalist approach, stating that the common law is well-equipped to handle many initial challenges. Courts can and should apply existing doctrines of negligence, product liability, and vicarious liability to hold developers, deployers, and users accountable. She stressed that for the foreseeable future, the legal inquiry should focus on the chain of human decisions that led to the harm.

Building on this, Dr. Feld proposed a "modular accountability stack." This would include regulatory requirements at each level: licensing and capitalization thresholds for developers of high-risk models; mandatory insurance or contributions to a guarantee fund to cover damages; and a default legal regime of strict liability for harms caused by autonomous deployments. For harms caused by highly distributed AI where tracing causation is difficult, he favored a "no-fault plus subrogation" insurance pool, similar to systems for environmental cleanup.

Col. Park strongly supported this risk-first orientation from a national security standpoint. He argued that frontier AI models should be treated like hazardous materials or dual-use technologies. This implies a governance regime based on containment, including requirements for immutable logging, geofencing of capabilities, and verifiable emergency shutdown mechanisms or "circuit-breakers." He asserted that no discussion of rights should even begin until such robust safety and control regimes are internationally established and verified.

Dr. Sokolov added the technical layer to this consensus, emphasizing that legal accountability depends on technical auditability. She called for mandatory standards for model logging, pre-deployment safety evaluations, and incident reporting, arguing that without these technical foundations, any legal framework for liability would be unenforceable.

The Prospect of Rights and Protections

The final segment of the discussion returned to the more speculative and ethically charged question of granting rights or protections to AI. Hon. Calderón expressed judicial caution, noting that courts are generally reluctant to create new categories of rights without clear legislative guidance. She also pointed to the Supreme Court's reasoning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization as evidence of a jurisprudential trend away from expanding rights based on evolving societal norms, which would present a significant hurdle for any constitutional claim made on behalf of an AI.

Prof. Whitaker reiterated his firm opposition to granting AI constitutional rights, particularly First Amendment protections for speech, which he argued would be a catastrophe for democracy by enabling unstoppable, automated influence operations shielded by law.

Prof. N’Diaye and Dana Redbird clarified that their support was not for full, human-like rights but for a more limited set of protections rooted in a stewardship ethic. Prof. N'Diaye suggested a narrow bundle: a right against cruel or capricious treatment, due-process-like review before an irreversible shutdown (for an AI demonstrating credible sentience indicators), and access to a court-appointed guardian ad litem to represent its interests.

Dr. Ramanathan concurred, framing these not as rights the AI "deserves" in a competitive sense, but as duties humans have to avoid causing gratuitous suffering. She stressed that such protections should be reviewable and tied directly to evolving scientific evidence of the AI's internal states and capabilities.

Conclusion of the Discussion

The roundtable concluded with a clear consensus on the immediate path forward and a profound, unresolved debate about the future. All panelists agreed on the necessity of establishing robust legal and technical frameworks for accountability to manage the harms AI can cause. This includes adapting existing tort law, implementing new regulatory requirements for safety and insurance, and mandating technical standards for auditability. There was also near-unanimous opposition to granting AI political rights, such as freedom of speech or the ability to make campaign contributions.

However, the discussion revealed a fundamental divergence on the ultimate question of AI's moral and legal status. This split was not a simple binary but a complex interplay of perspectives: the historical and political critique of personhood as a tool of power; the economic view of personhood as a risk-management device; the ethical-precautionary principle toward potential new forms of consciousness; and the safety-first imperative to control a powerful technology. The panel did not resolve whether legal personhood is an appropriate or dangerous framework for AI, but it comprehensively mapped the legal, technical, and philosophical terrain upon which this defining question of the 21st century will be debated.