Argentina's Congress is weighing a bill that would make it the first country in the world to let companies run with no humans inside them. Meanwhile the American billionaire Peter Thiel has been spending considerable time in the country with the President, Javier Milei, and has recently moved his family to Buenos Aires.
The bill creates a new legal category: the non-human corporation. These are companies run entirely by AI agents or robots, with no human owners, directors, or shareholders. Under the proposed law, the software itself can own assets, sign contracts, and pay tax. No country has done this. The European Union considered electronic personhood and rejected it. Several American states ban it outright. Argentina would be first.
Milei made the pitch himself, in a Financial Times op-ed co-written with his deregulation minister, Federico Sturzenegger. He compared Buenos Aires to Amsterdam in 1602, the birthplace of the Dutch East India Company, and invited the world's AI firms to build there free from what he called the deadly hand of premature regulation. The selling points are concrete: cheap energy for data centres, lithium for batteries, low wages, and an absence of rules.
“The machine and the legal entity were, together, the double helix of modern prosperity”
No stranger to libertarian ideas, Thiel has for two decades funded the dream of "exit". He backed seasteading, then Próspera, the charter city in Honduras, then Praxis, a self-styled network state that raised $525 million. The intellectual scaffolding comes from a 1997 book, The Sovereign Individual, which predicted that technology would let the wealthy slip free of the nation-state. The plan was always to build new countries, or carve private zones out of weak old ones.
Argentina may be accelerating that plan. Instead of seceding, Thiel may be thinking of converting an entire country into a free zone. Milei has floated replacing civil servants with AI, signed deals to run state services on foreign cloud infrastructure, and built an AI unit to monitor social media. The charter-city model needed an island. This needs a nation, and the government of Argentina is volunteering.
But there are unresolved issues with the Milei/Thiel plan. A normal company is a legal person you can sue, but real people are formally connected to it: directors who answer, owners who can be taxed or reached in court. A humanless company removes them. When one of these entities causes harm, there is no one behind the veil. Argentine academics point out that the country has no comprehensive framework for data protection or liability to catch what falls through. The law answers the question of who profits. It does not answer the question of who pays.
Takeaways: For thirty years the tech right wanted to escape the state. Argentina shows the next move is to capture one instead. A struggling country is selling the one asset rich nations refuse to offer, the absence of rules. Argentina is now a sandbox for the hardest questions in AI. Whether it counts as a person and who carries the blame? A fascinating experiment, but sadly, the people conducting it have every reason to want the loosest answer, not the safest one.