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NewsMaterial3 min readDisconfirmAI Editorial

Choi Kyung-jin, President of the Korean Information Law Society: The Basis for AI Legal Personhood Is Not 'Being Like a Human,' But 'For the Sake of Humans'

Choi Kyung-jin (최경진), President of the Korean Information Law Society and Professor of Law at Gachon University, argues in a ZDNet Korea column that legal personhood for AI should not be granted on the grounds that 'AI looks like a human,' but rather by asking 'what purpose does this legal service serve for humans?' Drawing analogies from the historical experiences of corporate legal personhood and the legal status of animals, he demonstrates that legal personhood is essentially a legal tool to extend human capabilities and protect human dignity. He points out that the reproducibility and distributed existence of AI make the determination of the 'unit of personality' itself a premise that cannot be avoided.

2026-10-21 20:59 GMT+8

There is a deep-seated intuition in discussions about AI legal personhood: since AI is becoming more and more like humans, should it be granted some form of legal personality? In a column published on ZDNet Korea on October 21, 2026, Choi Kyung-jin, President of the Korean Information Law Society and Professor of Law at Gachon University, flips this question. His core argument is: the basis for legal personhood has never been 'being like a human,' but 'for the sake of humans.'

This flip is not proposed out of thin air. Choi Kyung-jin first points out that humans are not the only entities possessing legal personality. Legal persons—companies, associations—have never been granted personality because they are 'like humans.' In 1911, Nicholas Murray Butler, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and President of Columbia University, referred to limited liability companies as 'the greatest invention of humanity in modern history' in a speech. The essence of legal personhood is a legal technology: allowing non-human entities to become subjects of rights and obligations, thereby extending human capabilities. Changes in the legal status of animals follow a similar logic—the German Civil Code declared in 1990 that 'animals are not things,' with an important rationale being that protecting animals serves to maintain human dignity itself.

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From this, Choi Kyung-jin shifts the question of AI legal personhood from 'whether AI qualifies' to 'under what circumstances legal personhood protection is needed.' He argues: if AI and robots can serve humanity by extending human capabilities like legal persons, while also needing to be incorporated into a coexistence framework like animals, then there is a functional reason to grant them legal personhood. He further distinguishes two possible purposes: one is to attribute AI productive profits to the AI legal person, using them as a source of compensation for damages caused to humans by AI; the other is to legally attribute a portion of the transition costs resulting from AI replacing human employment to the AI itself, rather than to the humans behind it.

However, Choi Kyung-jin does not shy away from the fundamental difficulties of this approach. He writes: 'A model runs simultaneously in millions of copies in data centers; copying a single weight file turns one existence into two; the body of a robot and the intelligence driving it are located at opposite ends of the network—in such a world, the unit of personality is not self-evident.' Human legal personality is built on the premise of 'one body, one life'; must AI personality also start from re-designing this premise? The author does not provide an answer, but leaves this as an open question requiring social discussion.

Finally, Choi Kyung-jin quotes the Roman jurist Hermogenianus: 'All law is established for the sake of humans' (Hominum causa omne ius constitutum est), bringing the argument to a close: the center of the AI legal personhood discussion must be humans, not AI. He emphasizes that the discussion should not start merely with 'AI should be treated like humans,' but should always return to humans themselves.

It is worth noting that Choi Kyung-jin himself acknowledges that this discussion remains forward-looking at present. In 2017, the European Parliament passed a resolution discussing the 'electronic person' status of autonomous robots, and the National Assembly of South Korea introduced a draft Basic Robot Act discussing robots as electronic persons; however, both discussions fell silent. Neither the EU Artificial Intelligence Act nor South Korea's AI Basic Act ultimately chose the legal personhood path. The author believes the difference between now and 2017 is that technology is moving from imagination to reality; he also admits that AI or robots truly becoming legal subjects completely equal to humans may still be a distant matter, but thinking ahead about 'what we will discuss if it arrives' has its value.

Sources

  • zdnet.co.kr↗
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