Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, submitted legislation in May to create a new corporate category for artificial intelligence-operated businesses.
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The questions it forces into the open are whether autonomous systems need their own legal structure to function in a regulated economy and what happens if they get one.
In a Thursday (June 4) op-ed in the Financial Times, Milei outlined a three-pillar strategy built on unregulated AI, a new corporate category and a competitive tax environment. The centerpiece is the “non-human corporation,” or entities operated by AI agents or robots, with human shareholders permitted but not required.
Federico Sturzenegger, Argentina’s minister of deregulation and state reform, contributed to the op-ed.
The bill would replace Argentine corporate legislation in force since 1972, the Digital Nomos blog reported Sunday (June 7).
Where AI systems exercise independent judgment in unpredictable environments, limited liability is not a luxury but a precondition for their existence, Milei said in the op-ed. He drew a parallel to the 1602 founding of the Dutch East India Company, framing limited liability itself as the legal innovation the AI era now requires. It’s the same structural unlock that he said made the Industrial Revolution possible.
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Shareholders could choose whatever corporate governance law they wish to apply, although ultimate beneficial owners must be disclosed, Milei said in the op-ed.
Milei also cited Sarcuni v. bZx DAO, a 2023 case in which the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California found that a blockchain-based DAO could be treated as a general partnership, a classification that stripped limited liability protection. For the Argentine government, that ruling illustrates why existing legal architecture fails autonomous entities.
The proposal drew immediate criticism. A combination of non-human corporations and full AI deregulation would create a system of “programmed impunity: human gains, social harm and responsibility shifted onto machines,” an electronics engineer and AI specialist posted on social platform X, the Buenos Aires Herald reported Friday (June 5).
Historian Yuval Noah Harari answered Milei in his own Financial Times op-ed Monday (June 8), warning that granting legal status to corporations run by non-human agents would hand them an all-purpose key to gain access to financial, economic and political systems. Countries granting legal personhood to AI risk becoming something the historical record offers no analogy for. They would not be a company-state but an AI-state governed by non-human corporations.
The accountability gap runs through existing legal systems. Contract law generally requires parties to hold legal personhood. When an AI agent acts across systems it has autonomously identified as relevant, establishing who granted authority and whether that authority was binding can become contested.
The European Commission formally withdrew its proposed AI Liability Directive in October, citing lack of agreement, pivoting toward a risk-based framework under the AI Act while stopping short of enshrining new legal categories for autonomous systems.
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