When Argentine President Javier Milei announced a congressional bill last month to create what he called "non-human corporations" — legal entities operated entirely by artificial intelligence — he set off a worldwide argument about machines, markets, and who answers when things go wrong. But corporate attorneys who have read the actual legislation say the reality is considerably less dramatic than the headline.
According to Reuters, the bill introduces a legal category called the "automated company" as part of a broader reform designed to modernise and reduce bureaucracy in Argentine corporate law. Under the proposal, AI agents or robots can handle the daily running of a business. Human shareholders are optional. What is not optional, however, is a human administrator: the bill requires one to oversee operations and does not relieve that person of responsibility for the outcomes of AI-driven decisions.
A three-pillar pitch to global investors
Milei laid out his vision in a Financial Times op-ed co-written with his Deregulation Minister, Federico Sturzenegger. The strategy rests on three foundations: keeping AI entirely unregulated, establishing the new corporate category, and offering a competitive corporate tax rate. The pitch is explicit. "We are open for business," Milei declared, positioning Argentina as the preferred destination for AI-native companies at a moment when regulators in the United States and the European Union are tightening their grip on the technology.
The wider package, known as "Super RIGI," targets investment projects of one billion dollars or more in sectors including AI data centres. Milei has repeatedly highlighted Patagonia's cold climate and energy supply as natural advantages for data centre infrastructure. In October, OpenAI and local energy company Sur Energy announced plans for a data centre with an investment of up to 25 billion dollars, signalling that some of the world's largest technology players are already paying attention.
“"We are open for business. We intend to offer the most attractive legal and fiscal environment for the AI companies that will define the 21st century." — Javier Milei, Financial Times”
Historians, lawyers, and blockchain sceptics push back
The proposal drew a sharp public rebuttal from Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and author of Sapiens, who published his own Financial Times op-ed days later. Harari warned that granting legal recognition to AI-run entities would hand them what he called an all-purpose key to financial, economic, and political systems, with no human left to hold accountable when something goes wrong. He argued that countries taking this path risk becoming not a company-state but an "AI-state," governed in practice by non-human corporations.
Legal specialists take a more measured view. Yonathan Arbel, a professor of AI law at the University of Alabama, told Reuters that Argentina could secure a "huge competitive advantage" if it cultivates a welcoming environment for AI business, though he suggested the bill would benefit from requiring AI agents to carry a verifiable digital identity for dealings with people and other companies. Maria Gisele Cano, a corporate attorney in Buenos Aires province, told Reuters she has already received more than a dozen inquiries from entrepreneurs in Argentina and abroad about the proposal, suggesting significant commercial interest even before the legislation has passed.
“"The most important thing is if the talent goes to Argentina. People will follow." — unnamed expert cited by Reuters”
The blockchain complication
The bill also permits the creation of decentralised autonomous organisations, or DAOs, which are companies built on blockchain technology where members vote on decisions using digital tokens. Argentina is already one of Latin America's largest cryptocurrency markets, a legacy in part of years of currency controls and inflation that pushed many citizens toward digital assets. But Ricardo Mihura Estrada, former president of Bitcoin Argentina, told Reuters that the bill's requirement for token holders to be identified and registered sits awkwardly with an industry whose appeal is built substantially on anonymity. "I think it's well intentioned, but I see difficulty in it being adopted in the blockchain world," he said.
Whether the bill becomes law is not yet settled. It still faces debate in Argentina's Congress, where lawmakers must weigh the economic case for first-mover advantage against the legal and governance risks critics have raised. For international observers, the stakes extend beyond Buenos Aires. As the European Commission continues refining its AI Act and the US debates its own regulatory approach, Argentina's experiment will be watched as a live test of what happens when a country decides to welcome AI into its corporate structures before anyone has fully agreed on the rules.
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