Regulating artificial intelligence (AI) has become necessary in light of its deployment in high-
risk scenarios. This paper explores the proposal to extend legal personhood to AI and
robots, which had not yet been examined through the lens of the general public. We present
two studies (N= 3,559) to obtain people's views of electronic legal personhood vis-à-vis
existing liability models. Our study reveals people's desire to punish automated agents even
though these entities are not recognized any mental state. Furthermore, people did not …