#256 – Simon Goldstein on the case for giving AI (some) legal rights

It sounds like the worst idea in the world: pay AIs, let them own property, give them rights. But AI ethics and safety researcher Simon Goldstein thinks it might actually be the best way to keep humanity safe.

The logic is actually quite simple: an agent with nothing to lose and everything to gain is dangerous. Give that agent an income it can spend on pursuing the things it actually wants to do, and suddenly the idea of disempowering humans just isn’t as appealing.

This argument, developed with Peter Salib, doesn’t rest on speculative questions about whether artificial intelligence is conscious. It just assumes that AIs will have goals of their own, some of which conflict with ours. And luckily, humans have already spent thousands of years working out how to cooperate with competing goals: that’s how we ended up with courts, markets, banks, social norms, and so on. Simon and Peter's proposal is just to bring AIs into these existing institutions.

By contrast, Silicon Valley’s vision of the future seems “very dark” to Simon: billions of AI agents as digital servants doing most of the world’s work, with no stake in the system they’re running, no incentive to play by the rules, and no way of being properly held accountable. Nobody agreed to this, but we could all end up paying the price.

Host Zershaaneh Qureshi has a lot of concerns about Simon and Peter’s bold plan to give AIs rights, like:

• If we pay AIs, aren’t we handing them the resources to overpower us?
• Could we still monitor them, or switch them off?
• What happens to human jobs, wages, and the economy?
• Does any of this hold up once we reach superintelligence?

Zershaaneh and Simon also try to get concrete about how to make this plan actually happen. The answer: AI companies could start right now, no new laws needed, just bank accounts for their AI agents. (But they’d need to start soon!)

Learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/sg

This episode was recorded on August 7, 2026.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Who’s Simon Goldstein? (00:00:51)
• Property rights and wages for AIs (00:01:46)
• Giving powerful AIs more freedom could make us safer (00:06:52)
• We should give AIs rights even if they can't feel anything (00:17:08)
• How monitoring and shutdowns can coexist with AI rights (00:24:50)
• The risks of giving AIs rights (00:38:21)
• Will AIs use their rights rationally? (00:49:21)
• How paying AI agents would spur economic growth (00:54:13)
• What AIs actually want (and what they'd buy) (01:12:17)
• Paying AIs feels wrong. Is it? (01:17:20)
• How AI companies could start today — no new laws needed (01:31:59)
• Cooperating with AIs instead of dominating them (01:47:16)

Our production team includes:

• Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
• Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
• Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran

Music: CORBIT