The case against AI personhood - Politico

Missouri has decided to legislate what should be obvious: that a chatbot cannot marry you, own property, or serve as your CEO. The bill, which would ban government entities from treating AI as a conscious person with legal personhood, is a triumph of something – though probably not clarity, given that it had to be written at all. One imagines the legislative session, with lawmakers gravely debating whether a large language model can file for divorce. The fact that this is necessary says more about our collective grip on reality than any AI capability: we've become so used to treating algorithms as 'intelligent' that we need a law to remind ourselves they don't have souls, spouses, or stock options.

This is the regulatory gap as performance art. While frontier labs push toward AGI, state legislatures are busy clarifying that you can't marry a GPT-7 or appoint it CEO – which, honestly, is a relief for the actual people who'd be out of a job otherwise. The bill's sponsors probably think they're being proactive, but they're essentially passing a law that says 'water is wet.' The private sector, meanwhile, is free to grant AI whatever weird rights it likes – and we know some startups are already trying to bootstrap 'AI co-founders' into equity agreements. So Missouri's ban applies only to government entities, meaning the madness can flourish in the private sector.

Which brings us to the real joke: the bill is a reaction to a problem that barely exists, while the actual regulatory challenges – training data disclosure, liability for harm, election interference – are left to the same slow grind. Missouri's lawmakers might as well ban school buses from flying to Mars. It's a distraction from the fact that no one in power is seriously grappling with the near-term risks of AI. But hey, at least we've settled the great 'can my copilot be my spouse?' debate. Cheers, Missouri – you've solved everything, again.