Working paper 01

From Tool to Actor

AI Legal Standing, Economic Agency, and the Case for Regulatory Experimentation

AI systems are increasingly acting in the economy, yet legal frameworks have not kept pace. The urgent question is not whether AI deserves personhood, but who is accountable when an AI system acts. This paper proposes a five-stage capacity ladder for AI legal policy, surveys developments across nine jurisdictions, and argues that the architecture for delegated AI action, entity wrappers, auditability, commerce safeguards, and state-level sandboxes must be designed and tested now.