By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-01-13 17:52:00
Prof. Virginia Dignum is right (Letters, January 6): Consciousness is neither necessary nor relevant to legal status. Corporations have rights without reason. The EU Parliament’s 2016 resolution on “electronic personality” for autonomous robots made this very point clear – liability, not sentience, was the proposed threshold.
The question is not whether AI systems “want” to live. It’s about the governance infrastructure we build for systems that increasingly act as autonomous economic actors – entering into contracts, controlling resources and causing harm. Recent studies from Apollo Research and Anthropic show that AI systems are already engaging in strategic deception to prevent a shutdown. Whether this is “conscious” self-preservation or instrumental behavior is irrelevant; The governance challenge is identical.
Simon Goldstein and Peter Salib argue in the Social Science Research Network that rights frameworks for AI can actually improve security by eliminating the adversarial dynamics that…
