Delaware wants to give AI agents something no one has offered them before: a legal identity of their own. The proposed Delaware AIC would let an autonomous system run a company, sign contracts, and face lawsuits in its own name, all inside a supervised sandbox.
For a century, Delaware has been the place where American companies come to exist on paper. More than a million businesses register there. Now it wants to register a new kind of entity, one with no human in charge.
The state calls the proposal the AIC, or artificial intelligence company. Delaware Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez and Norm Ai chief executive John Nay set it out in a Fortune commentary. It would create a legal entity whose daily affairs run through an AI agent, not a person.
At the agent’s direction, a Delaware AIC could hold and sell property, take on obligations, and sue or face suits under its own name. The idea builds on a 2023 paper in Science, co-written by Nay, which argued that nothing in several states’ law clearly stops an AI from running a company already.
How a Delaware AIC would work
