It’s the governance of AI that matters, not its ‘personhood’ | Letters

Readers respond to Prof Virginia Dignum’s letter on consciousness and safety

Prof Virginia Dignum is right (Letters, 6 January): consciousness is neither necessary nor relevant for legal status. Corporations have rights without minds. The 2016 EU parliament resolution on “electronic personhood” for autonomous robots made exactly this point – liability, not sentience, was the proposed threshold.

The question isn’t whether AI systems “want” to live. It’s what governance infrastructure we build for systems that will increasingly act as autonomous economic agents – entering contracts, controlling resources, causing harm. Recent studies from Apollo Research and Anthropic show that AI systems already engage in strategic deception to avoid shutdown. Whether that’s “conscious” self-preservation or instrumental behaviour is irrelevant; the governance challenge is identical.