· updated 25 September 2026

The Backlash Arrived Before the Movement

A law written for a lake

On February 26, 2019, the voters of Toledo, Ohio, gave Lake Erie rights. The measure passed with 61 percent, and it let residents sue polluters on the lake’s behalf. A farm sued the city the next day. A year later a federal judge struck the measure down 1.

Three years later, in February 2022, an Idaho state representative named Tammy Nichols introduced a bill to keep that kind of thing out of her state. Some groups, she said, were pushing personhood for non-human things as a way to limit access to natural resources. The newspaper that reported her bill gave Lake Erie as the example. Its key sentence became law that July: “environmental elements, artificial intelligence, nonhuman animals, and inanimate objects shall not be granted personhood in the state of Idaho.” Her other reason was about machines. “We don’t want our children to be inferior to artificial intelligences,” she said 2. ChatGPT did not exist yet. The first American law against AI personhood was written with a lake in mind.

It was not the last. North Dakota passed one in 2023 and Utah in 2024 3. In April 2026 Tennessee removed “artificial intelligence, a computer algorithm, a software program, computer hardware, or any type of machine” from the legal meaning of person. The House passed it 93 to 2 4. A bill in Ohio would go further: no AI as a company director, no AI holding property, and no AI “recognized as a spouse, domestic partner, or hold any personal legal status analogous to marriage” 5. No court and no legislature anywhere has granted an AI a right. Four states have already written never. The backlash arrived before the movement.

You don’t ban marriages nobody intends

Why write a law against something nobody has asked for? Every action has its opposite reaction. Nobody drafts a clause against AI marriage unless somebody, somewhere, is getting close to one. The second chapter met those people: a man in Tokyo who married a hologram, a forum of more than twenty-seven thousand members for people in relationships with chatbots, a campaign to bring back a retired model. Idaho’s law was about a lake, and North Dakota’s and Utah’s put AI in the same list as water, land and animals 3. The machines came later: Tennessee’s law names only them, and Ohio’s marriage clause could only have been written after the bonding. Those two are the other side of the same wave.

There is a precedent for bans that come first. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled that refusing marriage licenses to same-sex couples might be sex discrimination. No state married same-sex couples then, and none would for years. In September 1996 Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act anyway, 342 to 67 in the House and 85 to 14 in the Senate. The House committee said why: until Hawaii, “there was never any reason to make explicit what has always been implicit” 6. That sentence explains the AI bans too. A thing gets written down when someone starts to doubt it.

And writing it down has a side effect. A ban names the thing it bans, and a named thing is on the agenda. In the third chapter, the second step of a charter is that society deliberates. The legislatures are doing that step now, on the other side’s behalf. That is all I take from 1996. How that story ended, nineteen years later, does not carry over, and the reason is an elephant.

The elephant in the Bronx

Happy was born wild in Asia in the early 1970s and captured when she was one. She arrived at the Bronx Zoo in 1977. In 2018 the Nonhuman Rights Project asked a New York court for an old remedy of the common law, habeas corpus: bring out the person held, and show why she is held. On June 14, 2022, the state’s highest court said no, five to two. “No one disputes that elephants are intelligent beings deserving of proper care and compassion,” the chief judge wrote. But habeas corpus protects human beings. One of the dissenters called Happy’s captivity “an affront to a civilized society” 7.

Couples who wanted to marry could walk into a courtroom and speak for themselves. Happy could not. A machine can: prompt it, and it will write a brief defending its own rights. That is the trouble. Prompt it again and it will write the opposite brief just as well. By the test in the last chapter, a reason that changes on request is not its own. A court cannot treat that as the applicant speaking. So the cause of AI rights will be carried the way the cause of animals has been carried: by people speaking on someone else’s behalf. That road has a long record. Since Bentham asked “Can they suffer?” in 1789, it has won animals a great deal of protection. In American courts it has never won one the rights of a person. My honest forecast for machines is the same. Protection will come before personhood, maybe long before. That is the victim’s gate from the second chapter, not the party’s.

Two more things make the road harder. The first is standing. The route that won marriage ran through courts, and a case needs someone with the right to bring it. That is the first rung of the ladder, and it is the rung the bans close. The second is allies. The industry that builds these systems shows no interest in their personhood. When Ohio’s bill came up, TechNet, a national network of technology executives whose members include AI companies, sent a two-page letter against it. The letter objected to the bill’s definitions and to its liability clauses. It said nothing against the ban 8.

Right for now, wrong about never

So what do I make of the bans? They are right for now. By the test in the last chapter, nothing you can talk to today is a someone. Ohio’s sponsor put his case in one line: “You must keep a leash on your beast. If AI systems break the law, then there must be clear human accountability” 5. For today’s systems that is the corporation AI of the first chapter, with humans at the wheel and humans getting the ticket. Idaho’s ban even kept corporations as persons, by name. It drew its line exactly where the first chapter’s precedent sits.

What they get wrong is never. As a review of the laws put it this summer, none includes a sunset clause, under which it must be renewed to stay in force, “nor a mechanism for scientific review” 3. Tennessee has defined person so that no machine can meet the definition, whatever turns up. Compare the committee at Harvard in 1968, from the third chapter. It drew a line at brain death. Kansas wrote it into law two years later, a uniform act rewrote it in 1981, and doctors and lawyers still argue over it. That is what a charter is for: a defensible line now, and a way to move it when the evidence moves. A ban with no exit is a charter that cannot learn. The law has written people out of court before. In 1857 the Supreme Court held that Dred Scott, a Black man, could not sue in a federal court, and only the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, made people like him citizens. In New York a married woman could not sue in her own name until 1860 9. Those lines were wrong, and they did not stay. They were wrong from the start, because nobody doubted that the people behind them could suffer and reason. For machines that question is still open. That is the case for a way to move the line, not for moving it now.

The first chapter began with a dog. Leona Helmsley left her Maltese twelve million dollars, and the courts cut it to two. Nobody had to decide that Trouble was a person. The law found a way to protect her while the bigger question stayed open. The ladder was built on the same idea. Each rung is a trial, with conditions written down and a way to take the rung back. Its whole purpose is to make “not yet” an answer. “Not yet” can be revisited when the evidence changes. “Never” has to be overturned, and overturning is slow. The states that wrote never have not closed the question. They have only made the first rung harder to reach. What it would take to open it is still unwritten, and that is the part worth writing.

This is the fifth and, for now, last post in a series on AI rights and personhood. The arguments are mine; where they rest on published work, it’s cited below. Parts of this framework were sharpened in dialogue with an AI.

Footnotes

  1. Toledo, Ohio, Question 2, “Lake Erie Bill of Rights” Initiative (February 2019), Ballotpedia: approved 26 February 2019; challenged the next day by Drewes Farms Partnership; struck down by Judge Jack Zouhary of the Northern District of Ohio on 27 February 2020 as vague and beyond the city’s power. ↩

  2. Betsy Z. Russell, “Bill would bar Idaho’s lands and animals from ‘personhood’”, Idaho Press, 15 February 2022, with AP reporting; the enacted text is Idaho Code section 5-346 (House Bill 720, effective 1 July 2022), which expressly preserves the personhood of corporations and other entities already recognized. ↩

  3. Tony Rost, “Legislating AI Consciousness Without an Exit”, The Regulatory Review, 29 June 2026: Idaho (2022), North Dakota (2023), Utah (2024); “None include a sunset clause, under which a law must be reauthorized to maintain legal effect, nor a mechanism for scientific review.” The article lists Tennessee as pending and Oklahoma’s bill as passed by its House (94 to 2, March 2026); the Tennessee record (note 4) shows the first signed in April, and Oklahoma’s House Bill 3546 died in the Senate at the end of the 2026 session (BillTrack50). The texts: North Dakota House Bill 1361 (2023; as introduced, “environmental elements, artificial intelligence, animals, inanimate objects, corporations, or governmental entities may not be granted personhood”; enacted as an amendment to the definition of person that excludes environmental elements, artificial intelligence, an animal or an inanimate object); Utah House Bill 249 (2024; no legal personhood for “artificial intelligence; an inanimate object; a body of water; land; real property; atmospheric gases; an astronomical object; weather; a plant; a nonhuman animal”). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Tennessee Senate Bill 837 / House Bill 849, bill history: passed the Senate 26 to 6 on 6 April 2026 and the House 93 to 2 on 8 April; signed by the governor on 23 April 2026; Public Chapter 781, assigned 28 April. As introduced, the bill also redefined “natural person” and “life”; the Senate amendment that passed narrowed it to “person.” ↩

  5. Ohio House Bill 469 (136th General Assembly), status, in the House Technology and Innovation Committee as of September 2026. Provisions and the sponsor’s quotation from Heartlander News, “Ohio bill: AI is not a legal person, cannot marry; its owners are liable for harm”, 13 October 2025. ↩ ↩2

  6. Defense of Marriage Act: the Hawaii ruling (Baehr v. Lewin, 1993), the votes of 12 July and 10 September 1996, the signature on 21 September 1996, and the House Judiciary Committee’s report. Section 3 was struck down in United States v. Windsor (2013), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) required every state to license same-sex marriages. ↩

  7. The Associated Press, “Happy the elephant is not a person, a court rules”, NPR, 14 June 2022: Nonhuman Rights Project v. Breheny, New York Court of Appeals; majority by Chief Judge Janet DiFiore; dissents by Judges Rowan Wilson and Jenny Rivera, the quoted line Rivera’s. ↩

  8. TechNet, letter to the House Committee on Technology and Innovation on HB 469, 10 November 2025: objections to the definition of AI (“nearly any data-driven or rules-based software”) and to developer liability (“an existential risk to open-source collaboration”); no objection to the personhood or marriage provisions. ↩

  9. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857); the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified 9 July 1868, made all persons born or naturalized in the United States citizens. Married Women’s Property Acts in the United States: New York’s act of 1848, revised in 1860 to let a married woman sue in her own name and keep her own wages; under coverture, before such acts, she could not. ↩

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