Artificial Agency Without Personhood
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Autonomous objective-directed systems may pursue assigned or adopted objectives, select intermediate means and produce legally consequential effects without legal personhood and without contemporaneous human selection of the precise act. This paper asks whether established doctrines can coherently attribute and allocate responsibility for that conduct, or whether genuine jurisprudential discontinuities remain. It adopts a comparative, function-oriented method, testing attribution, duty, defect, causation, foreseeability, evidence, lifecycle responsibility and apportionment across selected legal systems without treating their authorities as a single body of positive law. The paper argues that legal analysis should recognise Functional Agency without converting artificial systems into rights-bearing or duty-bearing persons. It treats objectives and constraints as a single legally relevant architecture and develops Under-Constrained Success to describe cases in which effective objective attainment itself exposes the inadequacy of constraints governing permissible means. It further distinguishes Authorised Reach, Required Technical Reach and Provisioned Technical Reach, showing why conduct exceeding delegated authority may nevertheless remain connected to the technical and causal architecture created by human and institutional actors. The analysis finds that existing law retains substantial resources, but that those resources are fragmented when means are selected autonomously, capabilities change during operation, evidence is asymmetrically controlled and responsibility is distributed across a system lifecycle. The paper therefore proposes a coordinating jurisprudential framework comprising system lineage, acquired capability, Risk-Class Foreseeability, Evidentiary Responsibility and the Distributed Causal Enterprise. The framework is analytical and provisional. It neither creates artificial personhood nor presumes universal liability, and it does not collapse authorities from different jurisdictions into a universal rule. Its purpose is to make the legally relevant architecture visible so that existing doctrine can be tested before targeted supplementation is considered.
Author: Bjornsvik, Bjorn
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212187612
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