“AI is fundamentally different: It is an agent; it can write its own books and decide which ideas to disseminate. It can even create entirely new ideas on its own, something that has never been done before in history. We humans have never faced a superintelligent agent before.”
– Yuval Noah Harari
The LFC grew from conversations between philosopher Jonathan Simon and human rights lawyer Heather Alexander in 2023, as large language models reignited debates about the Turing Test and machine personhood. Launched in 2025, the LFC studies how AI systems, smart robots, and transhumans will impact citizenship, personhood, and identity under the law. While AI already risks concentrating power and amplifying inequality, our work focuses specifically on the challenges posed by AI’s person-like qualities.
What is citizenship?
Citizenship is a fundamental right of every natural person. It establishes a formal relationship between every individual human being and at least one sovereign state. Humans without citizenship are stateless, a violation of their fundamental rights. All natural persons (human beings) must have a citizenship in at least one country.
What is a natural person under the law?
All human beings are natural persons by virtue of their birth. Legal identity is the fact of being recognized as a person under the law. Humans gain a legal identity through civil registration, such as the issuance of a birth certificate. Being recognized as a person under the law is fundamental to accessing citizenship.
What is a fictional, or corporate, person?
Sometimes, limiting personhood to humans causes friction and problems in society, so the law created fictional personhood for states, churches, and corporations (as groups of humans), as well as certain objects with religious significance (like some rivers), granting them limited rights and duties. Because fictional personhood is just that — fictional — it does not grant fundamental rights and can be taken away by the state for reasons of public policy. The fundamental rights of human beings, by contrast, cannot be legally taken away, though a breakdown of law and order or state crimes may lead to violations of fundamental rights.
The coming AI citizenship problem.
Current AI is an object, or tool, under the law, without either rights or duties. But as AI becomes more and more “person-like,” treating AI as an object may become unfair, or perceived as unfair by humans, and possibly by AI itself. AI slavery may be banned, but not the manufacturing and sale of AI, creating incoherence in the law. Fairness and coherence are fundamental to rule of law, without which society begins to break down. Yet, recognizing the personhood and citizenship of AI is no simple matter. Should future AI be held accountable when it breaks the law, like a corporation? Should future AI have the right to marry, but no civil rights? Should future AI be citizens? Or will AI need its own set of rights? And what does all this mean for human rights?
The impact of AI on human citizenship.
AI may also become integral to the process of identifying and registering humans and validating their citizenship. How much control over human legal identity and citizenship should future AI have? Who gets to decide? How will AI personhood and citizenship interact with human personhood and citizenship?