Do AI systems deserve legal personhood? The instinctive answer — from almost everyone — is “absolutely not.” AI isn’t conscious. It doesn’t feel pain. It doesn’t have moral worth. Giving legal rights to a machine sounds like science fiction, or worse, like surrendering human primacy to our own creations. But here’s what most people don’t realize: we’ve already done this before. And the entities we gave legal personhood to weren’t conscious, didn’t feel pain, and definitely didn’t have moral worth. They were called corporations.
