Legal Personality of Artificial Intelligences: From the classical canonical concept of legal person to the design of a specific legal personality and a Registry of Artificial Persons

On 16 February 2017, the European Parliament made recommendations to the Commission about civil law rules on robotics, including a proposal to design a specific legal personality for autonomous robots and most sophisticated Artificial Intelligences with the capacity to make decisions and interact with third parties. Although the recent European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act presents notable advances on supervision, surveillance, control and registration in this field, the question of legal personality remains an open issue. In order to design a specific concept along the lines of the European Parliament’s proposal and to make further progress along this legal line, the classical concept of legal person devised by Sinibaldo Fieschi is an essential reference.