Pith Number

pith:5IQMJ4QF

pith:2026:5IQMJ4QFHTR26BZYCLLOS5OPUQ

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Precautionary Governance of Autonomous AI: Legal Personhood as Functional Instrument

Karsten Brensing

Limited legal personhood via a two-tier corporate structure closes responsibility gaps for autonomous AI.

arxiv:2605.12505 v1 · 2026-03-14 · cs.CY · cs.AI

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Record completeness

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

This article advances limited legal personhood as a functional governance instrument for advanced AI systems. Drawing on organizational law, it proposes a two-tier corporate architecture in which AI systems operate through purpose-bound operating companies embedded within human-controlled holding structures, enabling transparency, accountability, and structural reversibility while remaining agnostic with respect to consciousness and moral status.

C2weakest assumption

That existing legal systems can readily accommodate the proposed two-tier corporate architecture for AI without creating new attribution gaps or requiring extensive doctrinal overhaul, and that the structure will meaningfully close responsibility gaps rather than merely relocating them.

C3one line summary

Limited legal personhood for AI, implemented via purpose-bound operating companies within human-controlled holding structures, serves as a precautionary governance instrument that enables transparency and accountability without resolving questions of artificial consciousness.

References

76 extracted · 76 resolved · 0 Pith anchors

[1] Abbott, R. (2020). The artificial inventor project. WIPO Magazine, December 2020 2020

[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/NIM/?uri=celex%3A32018L0843 2018

[3] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/1640/oj 2024

[4] Bartal, I. B. A., Decety, J., & Mason, P. (2011). Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats. Science, 334(6061), 1427-1430. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1210789 2011 · doi:10.1126/science.1210789

[5] Bayern, S. (2016). The implications of modern business-entity law for the regulation of autonomous systems. Stanford Technology Law Review, 19, 93-112. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2758222 2016

Formal links

1 machine-checked theorem link

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-18T03:10:03.133493Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

ea20c4f2053ce3af073812d6e975cfa42a0b59b208f1243bbe8bc450b6f45b53

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.12505 · arxiv_version: 2605.12505v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.12505 · pith_short_12: 5IQMJ4QFHTR2 · pith_short_16: 5IQMJ4QFHTR26BZY · pith_short_8: 5IQMJ4QF

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/5IQMJ4QFHTR26BZYCLLOS5OPUQ \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: ea20c4f2053ce3af073812d6e975cfa42a0b59b208f1243bbe8bc450b6f45b53

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "3ee4f5eb5c0e60771b026ef81f1d4a0a0008e030ba2f5d6c4db668c9870d96e9",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CY",
    "submitted_at": "2026-03-14T19:38:19Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "0b59a0d36ba2685f83d14b3721248b20f2dcc79aa94ddc57f94aad2f071638e6"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.12505",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}