States rush to deny AI personhood amid growing fight over who should regulate
Being a person in America grants certain inalienable rights. Wars were fought over it. The latest battle hinges on whether artificial intelligence, or AI, should be considered as much of a person as you and me.
Numerous states have either passed or are considering legislation that would prohibit AI from having the same rights as human beings. It comes at the same time the Trump administration has pushed to make AI regulation a matter of the federal government instead of the states.
State regulation
Last month, a House lawmaker in Oklahoma filed new legislation that would prohibit AI from having personhood status.
“AI is a man-made tool, and it should not have any more rights than a hammer would,” Rep. Cody Maynard, R-Durant, told the Oklahoma Voice. “We’re starting to see stories of people trying to marry AI companions. There’s a lot of confusion going on where people are asking, do these systems rise to the level of sentience?”
Both Idaho and Utah have passed measures that would prevent any government entity from recognizing AI as a legal person. North Dakota has done the same.
An Ohio lawmaker has introduced legislation similar to Oklahoma’s that would bar AI from achieving personhood status.
What’s a person?
That’s a more complicated question than you might think when it comes to the law in America.
“In American legal history, the definition of person has had a very flexible meaning over time,” Katherine Forrest, co-chair of the Global AI Group for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.
Legal personhood allows for engagement in the legal system, whether that’s agreeing to contracts, being part of lawsuits and so much more.
The argument over who is a person dates to the beginning of this country and the Constitution’s infamous 3/5ths Compromise, which gave personhood rights to three out of every five slaves.
“Only white men of a certain particular class and status who owned a certain amount of property had the full array of rights,” Forrest said. “Women had fewer rights, as quote, ‘legal persons’ than men. And of course, people of color, both people who were Black and indigenous peoples in the United States had an array of rights that were different yet still.”
These days, the most common battle over personhood in the U.S. comes in the abortion debate.
“A person is actually less well defined than you might think, because we have arguments in some states as to whether fetuses should be considered persons,” Michael Froomkin, law professor at the University of Miami, told SAN.
There are other definitions of personhood as well.
“Over time, a category was created where a non-human could have certain rights, and often that’s synonymous with having a form of personhood,” Sital Kalantry, law professor at Seattle University, told SAN. “So, corporations are your emblematic case of an entity that has certain rights of people.”
In 1886, the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case began the notion of corporate personhood, stating corporations have the same protections as individuals under the 14th Amendment. Since then, legal rights have only expanded for corporations.
“It’s convenient to treat a corporation as a person for lots of things like making contracts, owning property and so on,” Froomkin said. “We do that because it advances social goals.”
AI personhood
“Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?” iRobot said.
We have yet to reach the level of the world of iRobot and the three laws that governed sentient robots in that film.
“We never want AI to be at the same level as we are, which at this point it isn’t,” Kalantry said. “So, it’s very premature to weigh in on whether they should have certain rights or not as legal persons, because they don’t have the characteristics of anything that’s human.”
So why the push to refuse AI personhood status at this point?
In the case of Maynard and Oklahoma, he said he wants to get ahead of the game to make sure companies can’t shift blame for unlawful actions onto the AI and skirt responsibility.
“I thought it was just critical that we need to get out in front and just go ahead and say it’s not a person, and therefore, companies can’t shift off any accidents onto the AI,” Maynard said.
Kalantry used self-driving cars as an example.
“If it were declared to be that your self-driving car is a person, the worry could be that you couldn’t get to the person making that self-driving car,” she said.
Froomkin echoed that sentiment.
“Were somebody silly enough to want to confer legal personhood on a program or a class of programs, that would create a lot of problems for liability and responsibility, because people build those things, and they might be able to argue they’re not responsible for what they do, and that wouldn’t help anybody,” he said.
While legislation to regulate this is coming from the right place, Froomkin said it’s not the biggest issue just yet with AI.
AI has come under scrutiny for a variety of reasons including a new phenomenon called AI psychosis.
“In some states, there’s real confusion as to whether a chatbot you encounter online should be treated as a product or service, and the liability rules are really different,” Froomkin said. “If you want to sue one for hurting you, your lawyer is going to do quite a lot of work. If we clear that up, that would make liability rules clear for everybody.”
That’s where things get extra complex. ChatGPT, for example, is owned by a corporation in OpenAI and has come under fire numerous times over the last few years.
“You can have legal persons who are owned by other legal persons,” Forrest said.
Forrest used the example of an employee at a corporation who ends up being held liable for a crime or another issue.
“You could have liability attached to that legal person, and whether or not the liability then goes up the chain to the quote, parent corporations, or the parent entities of that legal person would depend on a number of things under the law,” she said. “It would depend on whether or not the corporate formalities were maintained. It would depend on whether or not the activities of the quote legal person were within the expectations of the parent.”
States vs. federal government
The state’s legislation comes despite President Donald Trump pushing to avoid state-by-state regulations. The president signed an executive order in December 2025 which, in part, called for a stop to states regulating AI on their own.
“State-by-State regulation by definition creates a patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes that makes compliance more challenging, particularly for start-ups,” the order reads.
The order also called on Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick to publish an evaluation of state AI regulations and laws that the administration would consider overly burdensome for AI companies.
“He does believe that no regulation is the best thing for fast development of AI, right?” Kalantry said. “And will not worry about the consequences. “The children who are committing suicide, the people who are addicted, who these are their best friends, the misinformation that’s being created, the political issues that are created.”
Maintaining control
Trump didn’t address the issue of personhood for AI in his order but experts SAN spoke said that it will be an important issue if AI continues to develop at a rapid pace.
“They’re not going to just automatically get the rights unless they take over the world, which some people fear,” Kalantry said.
Forrest echoed that sentiment.
“We have to be sure that we humans remain ‘in control,’” she said.
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
