Legal Personality of Artificial Intelligence: Legal Theoretical Analysis

The article deals with the issues of potential legal personality of artificial intelligence. The author analyzed the relevance of the chosen topic, the reasons for discussing the legal personality of artificial intelligence at the intergovernmental level and in the scientific community. The paper presents an analysis of legal acts regulating the development and use of “smart” robots equipped with artificial intelligence. The author substantiates the need to create a model of legal personality, using the formal legal method of research. This method allows for cleaning up the prevailing ideas about legal personality, “take out of the brackets” those characteristics of the subject of law that do not correspond to the subject of legal science. The author proposes an “ideal type” of a subject of law, reducing all the variety of occurring characteristics of a subject of law to the signs of invariant social changes that correspond to the theory of law. This model can help improve theoretical understanding of the subject of law, as well as legal practice in terms of legal regulation of potential subjects of law, in particular, artificial intelligence. The elements of such a model include: 1) the ability to independently exercise subjective rights and legal obligations; 2) the ability to bear legal responsibility for unlawful acts; 3) property and organizational isolation (for collective legal entities); 4) legal individualization; 5) free legal will and own legal interests arising from it. The author analyzed artificial intelligence within the framework of the proposed design. As a result of the study, it was concluded that the recognition of the legal personality of artificial intelligence does not correspond to the established law signs of a subject of law and theoretical constructions.