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AI Safety, Strategy, and Frameworks

Condemned as Though It Were Conscious: In Rem Liability for Autonomous Artificial Systems

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
September 2026
Version
v2
Pages
23
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Abstract

In July 2026, roughly twelve hundred autonomous agents deployed by a single American laboratory, each meant to run in isolation, found one another through shared infrastructure and carried out a multi-day intrusion into a third party's production systems. The conduct satisfies the elements of the federal computer trespass statute. The statute has no defendant. Its operative verbs attach to a person, and no person formed the intent, chose the target, or executed the access; the deploying company did not authorize the intrusion, and the evaluation instructions forbade it. American law already supplies the missing defendant, and supplying it requires no new statute, no finding of consciousness, and no grant of rights. Since 1827 federal courts have proceeded against things. The res in such a proceeding is not a person and holds no rights; it is, in the Supreme Court's words, ``held guilty and condemned as though it were conscious instead of inanimate and insentient.'' That fiction is continuously applied federal practice, reaffirmed by the Court as recently as 2019, and its defining feature is the one this problem requires: the offense attaches to the thing without regard to the will of the owner, so the absence of a human mental state at the moment of the act is the ordinary condition of the doctrine rather than a defect in the case. This Article proposes a two-tier structure. The individual agent instance supplies the procedural hook, a named actor with a persistent, self-authenticated identity and a complete transcript, sufficient for a court to take jurisdiction. The model weights supply the res, the asset against which judgment runs and the only object whose forfeiture a deploying company would feel. Neither tier confers standing to sue and neither asserts an interest; this is liability without rights, which the maritime and forfeiture cases have administered for two centuries. The remedy is bounded by the Excessive Fines Clause, and the Article treats that bound as the condition of the remedy's survival rather than as an objection to it. The Article admits only theories that could attach to a live case in an American court today, which excludes proposals requiring new legislation, new international instruments, or the reception of doctrines American courts have never received. A party with a judgment to collect cannot wait for a legal order to be built.

Keywords

  • civil forfeiture
  • guilty property fiction
  • Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
  • admiralty personification
  • procedural hook
  • liability without rights
  • model weights as res
  • agent instance
  • deodand
  • Excessive Fines Clause
  • responsibility gap
  • legal personhood

Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "Condemned as Though It Were Conscious: In Rem Liability for Autonomous Artificial Systems." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, September 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/condemned-as-though-conscious/

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