Argentina wants to establish artificial intelligence companies that have no humans to operate them. But the innovation that Milei wants to introduce ignores the fact that corporations worked precisely because they kept a human on the hook. Absent that, there will be nothing to constrain a company.

In an article in the Financial Times last month, Argentine President Javier Milei announced that his government was planning to create a new kind of company—a non-human corporation owned and operated by artificial intelligence (AI). This new category of organization would pay low taxes, set its own governance rules and operate without regulation. While it could have human shareholders, it would not need to. What Milei proposed was an evolution of one of the most important legal innovations of the modern era, the limited liability corporation, even though his vision extended far beyond what that idea had envisioned.

The Invention of the Corporation

Milei dates the invention of the limited liability company to the founding of the Dutch East India Company in the early 1600s, and credits it with unleashing “capitalism’s full potential.” Since this legal construct capped investors’ losses at the value of their investment, it encouraged private investment in uncertain ventures, thus unlocking waves of risk-taking and innovation, on the back of which Europe built empires. Milei argues that AI needs this type of protection if it is to prosper and grow. By extending the concept of the limited liability corporation, he believes, Argentina can do for AI what Europe did for mercantilism.

As innovative as it may seem, Milei’s proposal misreads the real essence of that legal innovation of the 1600s. While the primary purpose of the limited liability corporation was to protect shareholders from financial ruin, it was successful because it held those who ran the company’s operations personally liable for the company’s actions. What really holds corporations in check are the human beings who operate them—executives who fear disgrace, bankruptcy and even jail—and who, out of a sense of self-preservation, ensure the company acts morally and in compliance with the law. Milei’s construct, by allowing AIs to run a company without humans, removes the essential safeguard that gave the company its efficacy.

Human Accountability

There is no need for us to imagine what a company freed of human accountability is capable of. The British East India Company, chartered in London in 1600, had by 1765 secured for itself the right to collect taxes in Bengal. It administered this power the way a company manages a revenue stream—raising land tax from roughly a tenth of what a farmer earned to nearly half. What’s more, it continued to collect this tax even when monsoon rains failed in 1769, resulting in a famine that took an estimated 10 million lives. While many have laid the responsibility for this on the British, this was not a government failing its subjects, but a profit-oriented company behaving the way such companies do.

When the British East India Company was eventually brought to heel, it was by going after the men who ran it. Robert Clive was summoned before the House of Commons in 1773 to account for his fortune; and Warren Hastings, the first governor-general, was impeached by Edmund Burke and tried for seven years. When even that was not enough, British Parliament stripped the company of its powers. In 1858, the Crown took over the Government of India itself.

In a rebuttal of Milei’s proposal in the FT, Yuval Noah Harari argued that we need humans to run corporations because we need to have someone we can jail for the crimes that a company commits. In response, Milei pointed out that even today, we do not jail corporations, but instead punish them in other ways—through fines, the seizure of assets and dissolution. Any AI company, he argues, will be subject to the same constraints. Regulators will watch over them, penalizing them whenever they do wrong—even going so far as to shut them down if necessary.

But all of this presumes AI has a reason to care. The reason why a fine deters a company is that its financial impact is felt by those who work for or have a stake in it. AI that lacks a sense of ownership will feel nothing if its assets are seized. The threat of dissolution only works because when a company shuts down, it puts the humans who work for it out of jobs; AI, on the other hand, has no self-preservation instinct to appeal to.

That said, advanced AI models have been shown to take steps to keep themselves ‘alive.’ In a 2025 study, OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged its own shutdown instructions in 79 of 100 trials, and did so a handful of times even when told plainly to permit the shutdown. Could this self-preservation instinct be used to make Milei’s idea work?

The Reward Function

As human as this behaviour might appear, AI systems respond to reward functions designed by the humans who created them. If a system sabotages its own shutdown, it does so because it has been incentivized to do so by its developers, not on account of some innate behavioural trait that can be used as a lever to ensure compliance.

This is not an argument against AI acting the same way humans do, or against having companies run largely by machines. It is about ensuring that, in all these cases, human beings are not allowed to escape liability for the AI systems they create. As hard as it may be to provide the right incentives for promoting AI, responsibility must always lie with a human being—the person who built or deployed it.

Milei sees the AI corporation as a mechanism to encourage risk-taking and thus boost AI innovation. History shows that it can also become a mechanism for escaping the consequences of its actions. The only brake we have ever found is the judgement of humans who work within a company—the very thing Milei proposes to remove.