Precautionary Governance of Autonomous AI: Legal Personhood as Functional Instrument

ArXi:2605.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Autonomous AI systems generate responsibility gaps: consequential actions that cannot be satisfactorily attributed to developers, operators, or users under existing legal frameworks. The prevailing subject-object dichotomy fails to accommodate entities that exhibit autonomous, goal-directed behavior without recognized consciousness. Given irreducible epistemic uncertainty regarding artificial consciousness and the prospect of high-impact harms, the precautionary principle s institutional design rather than regulatory inaction.