Argentina’s government wants to let a company trade with no person in charge of it, and it has sent Congress a bill to make that legal.
The proposal creates a new category called the non-human corporation, an entity run by AI agents or robots that can sign contracts and hold assets on its own, with human shareholders optional rather than required.
But read past the headline framing, and the bill turns out to lean on humans more than President Javier Milei’s pitch suggests, at a moment when most governments are moving toward tighter AI governance rather than looser rules.
Its most autonomous format, a blockchain-recorded structure modelled on a decentralised autonomous organisation, still requires a human legal representative to bind the entity to any act that needs a person’s signature, plus a human promoter who answers without limit for the company’s obligations at formation, according to legal analyses of the draft.
Wherever anti-money-laundering rules apply, a human compliance officer is required too.The government submitted the draft in May, proposing to replace Argentina’s general corporations law, in force since 1972. Officials have pitched the reform as resting on three pillars: keeping AI itself free of regulation, creating the non-human corporation category, and a low corporate tax rate to draw technology investment to Buenos Aires.
