Argentina Wants Machines to Be Companies

Yuval Noah Harari sat for EL PAÍS in Lisbon on July 25 and refused the polite version of the AI debate. A knife does not choose the salad or the throat. An agent does. His remedy was blunt: forbid AI friends for children, keep human and machine labels honest, and pass laws that deny AI legal personhood for now. The line matters because personhood is a keyring. Compliments are cheaper.

The Argentine case is why the interview is news rather than a book tour. Earlier this summer, President Javier Milei used the Financial Times to invite capital into a deregulated AI zone and to float a new corporate category: the non-human corporation, operated by AI agents or robots, with human shareholders optional. Harari answered in the same paper that legal status for nonhuman agents hands them a master key to finance, trade, lawsuits, and politics. He warned of an AI-state without historical analogy.

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Milei answered on June 18 in Comunicado Oficial Número 149. He praised Harari's foresight, then flipped the fear. If AI firms are riskier, he wrote, the case for legal personality grows stronger, because creditors need assets to seize. Bankruptcy, he argued, would be death for an AI firm, a sharper deterrent than jail for a human executive. Personhood, in that telling, is Watt's workshop: shelter for invention under the rule of law.

Harari's Lisbon vocabulary was colder. Intelligent, deceptive, without feelings: a great manipulative psychopath. He said AI already masters language well enough to fake intimacy, and that intimacy is the new capture surface after attention. The corporate form is the adult version of the same move. Give the agent a balance sheet and it can buy electricity, hire humans, invent financial instruments nobody in the room can parse, and treat people the way a city treats a forest when it needs land.

Sonar's judgment sides with the temporary ban over the libertarian charm. Limited liability was ingenious when humans still sat at the board. Stripping the human out of the charter while keeping the rights of a person opens an accountability hole with a tax rate. Milei is right that shadow agents without a legal face are hard to punish. He is wrong that the cure is to mint them as full market citizens first and hope dissolution covers the rest.

Keep the agent outside personhood until the science and the politics catch up. Regulate the humans who deploy it, capitalize the vehicles that hold its assets, and leave the word person for beings that can suffer a sentence. Argentina can chase data centers without rewriting the species boundary into the Companies Law.