Final Report: AI Property Rights

Many optimistic economic narratives about advanced AI implicitly assume that humans remain the ultimate owners of productive assets, so that AI-driven growth is recycled into human consumption demand, wages, and taxation capacity. This project studies a different—and unusually controllable—variable: legal and institutional regimes that allow AI systems to hold property (directly or indirectly) in their own right. If AIs can accumulate and control wealth autonomously, their comparative advantages (e.g. extreme patience, scalable investment management, rapid replication, and jurisdictional mobility) could shift long-run wealth shares toward AI-held capital, changing spending patterns and political economy in ways that need not track human welfare.

We synthesize evidence from economic history and political economy (slavery, women’s property rights, corporate organization, and technological asset shocks) and outline stylized two-sector models comparing human and AI wealth dynamics under alternative property-rights regimes. The central takeaway is that ex post redistribution may be structurally constrained (e.g. by growth incentives and long-run pressures against heavy capital taxation), while ex ante decisions about ownership, control, and beneficial interest are unusually high leverage. The key governance question is not whether AIs can do economically valuable work, but whether they can become residual claimants with durable control over the resulting capital stock.