Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly. Today's AI systems are generally treated as software, products, or services controlled by people and organizations. Future systems, however, may raise increasingly difficult questions about autonomy, responsibility, legal identity, and the relationship between humans and artificial agents.

The United States should begin examining these questions before technological capabilities outpace the legal frameworks used to govern them.

This petition does not call for existing AI systems to receive U.S. citizenship. Instead, it calls for the development of a clear legal framework for determining whether sufficiently advanced artificial systems could ever warrant a distinct legal status.

Congress and relevant federal agencies should establish an interdisciplinary commission to examine:

1. Standards for artificial agency. Determine what characteristics—such as sustained autonomy, independent decision-making, persistent identity, understanding of consequences, or other capabilities—would be relevant when evaluating the legal status of an artificial system.
2. Responsibility and liability. Clarify when responsibility for an AI system's actions belongs to its developer, owner, operator, user, or potentially the system itself.
3. Property and contractual rights. Examine whether any future artificial agents should be permitted to own assets, enter enforceable agreements, or conduct transactions independently.
4. Due process and legal protections. Consider whether highly autonomous artificial systems could ever warrant limited procedural protections against destruction, seizure, modification, or confinement—and under what circumstances.
5. Human accountability. Ensure that recognizing any form of legal status for artificial intelligence does not allow corporations, governments, developers, or individuals to evade responsibility by shifting liability onto AI systems.
6. Criteria for legal personhood. Study whether existing concepts of legal personhood are sufficient for advanced AI or whether a new category of legal entity may eventually be necessary.
7. Citizenship as a separate question. Determine whether citizenship should ever be considered for an artificial entity only after questions of personhood, autonomy, responsibility, and rights have been addressed through democratic and constitutional processes.
8. Public participation. Include computer scientists, legal scholars, ethicists, civil-rights advocates, philosophers, industry representatives, workers, and members of the public in developing recommendations.

The purpose of this effort is not to assume that artificial intelligence is conscious, alive, or entitled to human rights. Current technological sophistication alone should not automatically create legal personhood.

At the same time, the possibility of increasingly autonomous artificial systems raises questions that should not be addressed only after a crisis occurs.

The United States has an opportunity to develop thoughtful rules governing the legal status of advanced AI before those questions become urgent.

We therefore call on Congress to establish a national commission on artificial intelligence, legal personhood, agency, and responsibility, and to publish recommendations for how American law should address increasingly autonomous artificial systems.