Javier Milei has sent Argentina’s Congress a bill on commercial companies under which a company can be owned and run by software without a single human. The new legal category is called a non-human corporation, and such a company needs no human shareholder. In a commentary for the Financial Times, the president described it with the words “Let Buenos Aires be for AI what Amsterdam was for the age of sail”, and added the sentence “We are open for business”.

Beneath the marketing gesture lies a concrete intervention in corporate law, which has always assumed a human at the end of the chain.

What the bill introduces

Milei sent Congress a new version of the commercial companies law at the end of May. It introduces “automated companies” that operate exclusively through algorithms or AI with no human employees, alongside decentralised autonomous organisations running on blockchain. The bill leaves AI unregulated, creates a separate corporate category with limited liability for these entities and promises a low corporate tax.

Argentina’s existing corporate law dates from 1972, and the bill is meant to replace it. Ultimate beneficial owners must be disclosed under it, and Federico Sturzenegger, minister of deregulation and state reform, took part in preparing it. Milei argues that for systems that make independent decisions in an unpredictable environment, limited liability is a necessity.

A corporation with legal personality can own property, sign contracts, and sue and be sued. Under this proposal, those powers could be exercised by an entity behind which no natural person stands.

The bill is still awaiting approval from Congress, where Milei does not have a majority.

The proposal opened a public exchange with the historian Yuval Noah Harari, who responded with his own commentary for the Financial Times titled “We should not grant legal personhood to AI agents”. Harari warned that Argentina risks becoming not a new Amsterdam but a new Batavia, the port where the Dutch East India Company committed its greatest excesses. A state that grants legal personhood to AI could, in his view, become a place where non-human corporations take over financial, economic and political systems, and where punishment for breaking the rules has no addressee, a body he called the “AI-state”. The core of his objection is responsibility: when a company breaks the law, sanctions ultimately fall on the people behind it. A corporation without a human severs that link.

Milei rejected Harari’s objections. He thanked him for taking part in the debate and repeated that he wants to let AI develop “without the deadly hand of premature and poorly understood regulation”.

The European framework is built on the opposite principle

In 2017 the European Parliament recommended exploring the status of “electronic persons” for the most sophisticated autonomous robots, which would themselves bear liability for the damage they cause. An open letter signed by more than 150 experts from 14 countries opposed this. Robotics expert Kate Darling argued at the time that “Your cat makes autonomous decisions, too, but we do not hold the cat legally responsible for its actions.” The status was never adopted.

The European approach is anchored in the opposite principle. Article 14 of the AI Act requires that high-risk systems “shall be designed and developed in such a way, including with appropriate human-machine interface tools, that they can be effectively overseen by natural persons during the period in which they are in use”. A human in the process is, in the European framework, a condition for the system to operate. Argentina goes exactly in the opposite direction.

The same direction in newsrooms

Removing the human from a company is the extreme point of a movement that is happening elsewhere too. The BBC wants to cut hundreds of jobs at the heart of its news operation, with around 2,000 positions across the corporation expected to go. The cuts come at a time when newsrooms are being rebuilt around software.

The Future Newsrooms Study 2026, which FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA built on a survey of 448 newsroom leaders in 86 countries, describes how newsrooms around the world are rebuilding their strategies, workflows, structures and skills in response to AI, changing audience behaviour and commercial pressure. Human jobs disappear from newsrooms in much the same way that the human owner disappears from the Argentine company.

Where the human does not disappear from the chain

The creator economy is moving in the opposite direction at the same time. Instead of removing the human from the company, it turns a specific human into a company. CAA and the TPG fund, through Integrated Media Company, founded the holding Compound Creative Holdings with $250 million for acquiring companies built around individual creators. Its stated aim is to “partner with the artists, entrepreneurs and independent voices of today who are reshaping entertainment, and provide patient capital, operational infrastructure, and commercial edge”.

The asset this holding buys is a specific person and their audience. That is the layer a non-human corporation by definition does not have, and which software cannot replace. A creator’s value rests precisely on what Argentina removes from the company.

Two directions therefore run side by side. On one side, a legal framework in which a company does not need a human, and newsrooms where human jobs are being cut. On the other, a market that buys an individual’s name and face as a balance sheet item. The question the Argentine bill raises out loud is where in the value chain a human remains irreplaceable.

By Šárka Möllerová