AI-Fabricated Legal Personality: Agency Without Intent and the Legal Effects of Contracts
Keywords:
artificial intelligence, identity forgery, legal personality, contractual intent, civil liability, electronic contract.Abstract
The expansion of generative models and autonomous artificial intelligence agents has given rise to an emerging form of forgery: the creation or appropriation of the identities of natural and legal persons and the conclusion of contracts in their names without any underlying human intent. Using an analytical-critical method and a comparative approach, this article first demonstrates why the fundamental concepts of legal personality, capacity, and agency in Iranian law are founded upon attributable intent and why the statistical output of an algorithm cannot be accommodated within any of these legal categories. It then examines the legal status of contracts concluded under machine-generated false identities and concludes that such contracts are absolutely void due to the absence of contractual intent and legal capacity, although invalidity alone provides no adequate remedy for a good-faith contracting party. The article makes two principal contributions. First, it develops a three-stage test for the attribution of liability, designed to allocate losses among the developer, operator, and intermediary platform on the basis of the legal doctrines of inducement, direct destruction of property, and indirect causation. Second, it formulates the paradigm of an “advanced instrument accompanied by a chain of liability,” which addresses existing legal gaps without conferring legal personality upon machines. Finally, ten legislative, technical, and institutional measures are proposed for the Iranian legal system.
References
Allen, T. (2019). The Law of Agency and Artificial Intelligence: Rethinking Liability Attribution. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 39(4), 771-803. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqz025
Bryson, J. J., Diamantis, M. E., & Grant, T. D. (2017). Of, for, and by the People: The Legal Lacuna of Synthetic Persons. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 25(3), 273-291. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-017-9214-9
Chopra, S., & White, L. F. (2011). A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents. University of Michigan Press.
Danaher, J. (2020). Welcoming Robots into the Moral Circle: A Defence of Ethical Behaviourism. Science and Engineering Ethics, 26(4), 2023-2049. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-019-00119-x
European Banking Authority. (2023). Report on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services: Cybersecurity Risks and Fraud.
Farajpour, R. (2025a). Legal and Comparative Analysis of Civil Liability of Artificial Intelligence in Automated Decision-Making. AI and Tech in Behavioral and Social Sciences, 3(3), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.61838/kman.aitech.3.3.4
Farajpour, R. (2025b). The Role of Civil Liability in Artificial Intelligence Laws from the Perspective of Major Global Legal Systems. Journal of Law and Political Studies, 5(1), 182-196. https://doi.org/10.48309/jlps.2025.518711.1353
Farajpour, R., Amerinia, M., & Gorjinia, M. (2024). Ethical Requirements in the Process of Adopting the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act. Cyber Law Studies, 3(4), 37-53. https://doi.org/10.71488/cyberlaw.2025.1127854
Farajpour, R., Amerinia, M. B., & Pourjavaheri, A. (2025). The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Arbitration and Legal Challenges Arising from Automated Decisions in Sports. AI and Tech in Behavioral and Social Sciences, 3(2), 21-28. https://doi.org/10.61838/kman.aitech.3.2.3
Farajpour, R., Mahmoudi-Moghaddam, S. M., Babaei, D., Rostami, H., & Kiani, M. (2025). Legal Effects and Consequences of Granting Legal Personality to Artificial Intelligence Systems in Iranian and European Union Law. New Research in Islamic Humanities Studies, 4(Special issue), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.22034/api.2026.2087166.1696
Katouzian, N. (2019). General Rules of Contracts (10th ed., Vol. 1). Enteshar Co.
Mirsky, Y., & Lee, W. (2021). The Creation and Detection of Deepfakes: A Survey. Acm Computing Surveys, 54(1), 1-41. https://doi.org/10.1145/3425780
Muller, V. C. (2022). Legal Personhood for Artificial Agents: Why It Is Not Needed and What Is Needed Instead. Philosophy and Technology, 35(2), 45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00547-7
Naeimi, M., & Habibi, M. (2023). Legal Analysis of Digital Signature Forgery in Light of the Electronic Commerce Act. Journal of Islamic Law, 20(79), 187-221.
Shahidi, M. (2017). Effects of Contracts and Obligations (6th ed.). Majd Scientific and Cultural Assembly.
Starck, B., Roland, H., & Boyer, L. (2019). Civil Law: Obligations: Tort Liability (8th ed.). LexisNexis.
Verdoliva, L. (2020). Media Forensics and Deepfakes: An Overview. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 14(5), 910-932. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTSP.2020.3002101
Downloads
Published
Submitted
Revised
Accepted
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Reza Farajpour
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
