Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

This Article proposes that tax can be a useful supplement to other measures to regulate Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AAI) and limit its potential harmful effects. This proposal differs from command-and-control regulation of AAI along the lines of European Union legislation that may unduly limit the development of AAI. It also differs from existing proposals to tax AAI to generate revenue to help workers displaced by AAI programs, or to tax the data used by AAI The proposal is based on granting AAI programs like ChatGPT separate legal personhood, like corporate personhood, while incentivizing or requiring their corporate owner to place them in a separate corporate shell. The tax rate on AAI's income is adjusted based on harmfulness indices based on an objective assessment, thereby creating an incentive for its corporate owner to reduce the harm. Developing a new tax on AAI excludes it from the limits imposed by the existing international tax regime on taxing multinationals, which are inappropriate for a tax on a person that does not have a physical location except on servers that can be located anywhere. Instead, the tax should be levied by the jurisdictions in which AAI users are located.

Comments

Originally published and available at Reuven Avi-Yonah, Lucas Brasil Salama, Herbert Snitz, and W. Robert Thomas, Boden Lecture: Taxation of Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, 108 Marq. L. Rev. 1081 (2025). Available at: https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/mulr/vol108/iss4/7

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