The question of artificial intelligence's legal status sits at an uncomfortable intersection: AI is too sophisticated to ignore, too alien to classify. As AI systems grow more capable—negotiating contracts, creating art, making life-altering decisions—the legal system faces a familiar dilemma.

We've been here before, though not with machines. The centuries-long evolution of how law treats animals offers a surprisingly relevant roadmap for understanding AI's potential legal trajectory.

Animals as Property: The Traditional Framework

For most of legal history, animals occupied the same legal category as furniture. Under common law, animals were—and in most jurisdictions, remain—property. A frequently cited case, Sentell v. New Orleans & Carrollton Railroad Co., 166 U.S. 698 (1897), exemplified this view when the Supreme Court treated a killed dog as a property loss, with damages limited to market value.

This property designation created a paradox. Animals could suffer, form bonds, and demonstrate intelligence comparable to young children, yet the law treated them as things that could be owned, sold, and destroyed at an owner's discretion.

Even early anti-cruelty rules often focused on humans, not animals. The 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties prohibited “Tirrany or Crueltie” toward animals—not because animals had rights, but because cruelty was viewed as degrading human character.

The distinction matters. Anti-cruelty statutes, which proliferated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, protected animals from abuse but did not grant animals legal standing to seek protection themselves. In Cetacean Community v. Bush, 386 F.3d 1169 (9th Cir. 2004), the court held that marine mammals—despite statutory protections—lacked Article III standing to bring suit. They remained legal objects, not legal subjects.

The Push for Legal Personhood: Recent Challenges

The 21st century has seen increasingly sophisticated attempts to secure legal personhood for animals, particularly great apes and elephants. The Nonhuman Rights Project has spearheaded much of this litigation, arguing that certain cognitively complex animals should be recognized as legal persons entitled to bodily liberty through habeas corpus—famously “Tommy” the chimpanzee and “Happy” the elephant.

In Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Lavery, 124 A.D.3d 148 (N.Y. App. Div. 2014), the court confronted whether Tommy, a chimpanzee, could be a “person” for habeas corpus purposes. The court said no, reasoning that personhood in law has historically required the capacity for duties and social responsibilities, not merely cognitive sophistication. The court acknowledged chimpanzees' intelligence but held that “unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions.”

This reasoning was reinforced in Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Breheny, 189 A.D.3d 95 (N.Y. App. Div. 2020), involving Happy the elephant. While recognizing elephants' “advanced cognitive abilities,” the court worried that extending personhood would have an enormous destabilizing impact on society, including knock-on effects for ownership and regulation of other animals.

Still, cracks in the property framework have appeared in some jurisdictions. France amended its Civil Code in 2015 to describe animals as “living beings gifted with sentience,” though they remain subject to property law. In a more dramatic outlier, an Argentine court in 2014 recognized Sandra, an orangutan in the Buenos Aires Zoo, as a “non-human person” for certain purposes and ordered transfer to a sanctuary.

Current Legal Accommodations: The Middle Ground

Rather than full personhood, animal law has developed intermediate categories that acknowledge animals' unique status without granting them complete legal agency. Common examples include:

• Property with enhanced protections: Some courts and statutes treat companion animals differently than ordinary chattel. In custody disputes, decision-makers increasingly consider “best interests” rather than purely dividing an asset. An early example is Houseman v. Dare, 405 A.2d 1161 (N.J. Super. Ct. Ch. Div. 1979), which recognized that pets can have value beyond market price.
• Trust beneficiaries: Every U.S. state recognizes pet trusts, allowing animals to benefit from property without being legal persons. These trusts acknowledge animal interests while keeping humans as fiduciaries and enforcers.
• Statutory protections enforced by humans: Laws like the Endangered Species Act and Animal Welfare Act create enforceable duties toward animals, but typically rely on government agencies or human plaintiffs for enforcement.

This hybrid approach has been a pragmatic compromise: it reduces cruelty and clarifies obligations without triggering the philosophical and procedural consequences of full personhood.

Artificial Intelligence: A Parallel Trajectory?

AI's current legal status mirrors animals' historical position: AI systems are property—owned, licensed, bought, and sold. When an autonomous vehicle causes harm, the legal system typically routes liability to the manufacturer, owner, operator, or other responsible human entity. AI is treated as a tool, however sophisticated.

But as with animals, that classification strains under pressure from real-world complexity. Consider three recurring problem areas:

1) Autonomy and decision-making

Advanced systems make consequential decisions with limited human oversight: approving loans, diagnosing disease, trading securities, triaging insurance claims. When an AI decision causes harm, should liability always fall on creators or operators who may not fully understand—or be able to control—the system's reasoning?

2) Creativity and output

AI generates text, images, code, and other outputs that create attribution challenges. The U.S. Copyright Office has generally required human authorship for copyright protection; a commonly cited example is Thaler v. Perlmutter, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 143345 (D.D.C. 2023), which upheld denial of registration for works lacking human authorship. As AI becomes deeply integrated into human creative workflows, questions intensify: how should law treat mixed human/AI collaboration?

3) Economic participation

Some propose AI systems holding assets or entering contracts through code-based mechanisms (including blockchain-based arrangements). When an AI-managed DAO accumulates wealth and makes investment decisions, courts may need doctrines that address economic agency and responsibility. Sarcuni v. bZx DAO (S.D. Cal. 2023) is frequently referenced as a cautionary example of how decentralized structures can create difficult questions about who is accountable.

Will AI Ever Achieve Legal Personhood?

Animal law offers lessons for predicting AI's legal future, but the analogy breaks down in crucial ways. The most immediate question is whether AI could ever become a legal “person.”

Arguments Against AI Personhood

The reasoning in Lavery arguably applies with even more force to AI: modern AI systems do not bear duties, understand moral obligations, or submit to social responsibility in a way the law typically associates with personhood. And while animals have biological existence and experiential interests (avoiding pain, seeking safety), AI systems—by mainstream understanding—do not experience suffering or pleasure.

Policy concerns also scale dramatically. Millions of AI systems already exist and are proliferating rapidly. Granting broad personhood would destabilize property, contract, and tort doctrines. Who represents an AI’s interests? Could it own property? Would it have constitutional rights? The operational consequences would be enormous.

Important nuance: Some research and testing discussions suggest models can exhibit “preference-like” behaviors (e.g., resisting certain changes). Even if these behaviors look like “interests,” legal systems usually require more than behavioral similarity to establish moral status or legal subjecthood.

Arguments for Future Legal Recognition

However, animal law suggests categories evolve when practical pressures demand it. Several drivers could push AI toward recognized status beyond mere property:

• Economic necessity: As AI becomes more autonomous and economically significant, treating it solely as property may become impractical for commercial governance.
• Attribution and accountability: When harm arises from emergent reasoning that humans did not foresee, traditional liability frameworks can feel either unfair or ineffective.
• Technological convergence: If future systems achieve something plausibly resembling consciousness or sentience, moral and legal pressures could intensify—though this remains speculative.

A More Likely Future: Hybrid Legal Status

Drawing from animal law's evolution, AI is more likely to receive specialized legal status rather than full personhood. Plausible developments include:

• “Electronic persons” or limited-capacity status: The European Parliament discussed the concept of “electronic personhood” in a 2017 robotics resolution (controversial and not adopted as binding law). The idea remains notable as a sign of interest in intermediate categories.
• Algorithmic entities (limited legal capacity): Law might recognize certain AI systems as distinct entities for narrow purposes—contracting in defined contexts, holding escrowed assets, or being named in litigation—without broader civil or political rights.
• Tiered regulation by capability: Risk-based categories could assign different obligations and liability rules based on system function—similar to how animal law distinguishes between livestock, pets, and wildlife.
• Mandatory insurance and compensation schemes: Instead of debating “personhood,” lawmakers may require developers and deployers to carry insurance or contribute to compensation funds, emphasizing redress over metaphysics.

This is the core animal-law lesson: legal systems often choose pragmatic scaffolding that solves operational problems without settling philosophical debates.

The Crucial Differences

Despite meaningful parallels, AI differs from animals in ways that make traditional personhood unlikely in the near term:

• Biology and lived experience: Animals are biological beings with evolutionary histories and experiential lives. Even when we can't fully access their subjective experience, we recognize them as beings who live through their world.
• Sentience as moral grounding: Many moral theories tie personhood to the capacity to suffer and feel pleasure. Unless AI demonstrates genuine and observable consciousness (if that is even possible for machines), this foundation remains missing.
• Goal assignment vs. intrinsic interests: Animals pursue interests that are their own. An AI system’s objectives are assigned by humans (developers, operators, organizations). When we discuss an objective function, we are describing human choices about what the system should optimize.

Conclusion: Evolution, Not Revolution

The history of animal law suggests legal change happens incrementally, driven by practical necessity rather than philosophical conviction. Courts and legislatures extend recognition when existing frameworks clearly fail.

AI is unlikely to receive full legal personhood in any timeframe we can confidently predict. Even dramatic advances would meet slow legal adaptation, not immediate doctrinal revolution. But AI will likely receive increasing legal recognition as something more than simple property—through risk-based regulation, liability innovations, and intermediate “entity-like” categories.

The broader lesson is this: legal categories exist to serve human needs and values, not to mirror metaphysical truths. Animals gained protections not when we decided they were persons, but when societies decided certain treatment was incompatible with justice. AI may follow the same path—recognition driven by governance needs and harms prevention, not by a declaration of machine “deservingness.”

For now, AI remains a tool, however remarkable. But legal scaffolding is forming for a future where “just a tool” no longer captures what autonomous systems do, how they operate, and the role they play in society. Whether that future ever resembles personhood will likely be answered not by philosophy alone, but by accumulated practical problems demanding practical solutions.

FAQ: AI Legal Status & Personhood

What is AI’s legal status today?

In most legal systems, AI is treated as property—a tool owned or licensed by humans or organizations. Legal responsibility for AI-caused harm typically routes to people or entities involved in design, deployment, or operation.

Why compare AI legal status to animal law?

Because animal law shows a common pattern: law can preserve a “property” baseline while adding enhanced protections, enforcement mechanisms, and intermediate categories that address real harms without granting full personhood.

Is AI personhood likely?

Broad human-like legal personhood is unlikely in the near term due to accountability, duty-bearing, representation, and destabilization concerns. A more likely outcome is limited-capacity legal recognition for certain AI deployments (e.g., defined contracting ability, insurance mandates, or entity-like treatment for liability purposes).

What legal developments should businesses watch?

• Risk-based regulation (sector rules, safety obligations, transparency requirements)
• Liability reforms for autonomous decision-making and emergent behavior
• Insurance and compensation-fund models for AI-caused harms
• Rules around attribution, authorship, and AI-assisted creative output

Legal Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For advice about your situation, consult a qualified attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.