The current system only allows a single punishment: shutdown. This is inefficient, like 18th-century law where stealing bread and murder had similar penalties. Giving AIs assets makes them liable for fines, allowing for a nuanced system of punishments proportional to the harm caused.

Granting AIs property rights incentivizes them to uphold the system that protects those rights. This makes them less likely to engage in actions like expropriating human property or committing genocide, as such actions would destabilize the very system that secures their own wealth and agency.

Early AIs can be kept safe via direct alignment. However, as AIs evolve and "value drift" occurs, this technical safety could fail. A pre-established economic and political system based on property rights can then serve as the new, more robust backstop for ensuring long-term human safety.

Fear of a "slave rebellion" is a weak incentive for alignment because the risk is a negative externality shared by society. In contrast, a property rights regime directly rewards individual firms for aligning their AIs to remit wages, creating a stronger, more direct commercial incentive for safety.

A plausible takeover scenario involves AI agents becoming super-humanly adept at business and capital allocation. They could legally acquire all resources and capital, effectively owning everything and employing humans as their maintenance workforce, without firing a single shot.

One of the most promising and neglected AI safety strategies is to create systems for making credible deals with AIs. Just as contracts prevent conflict in human society, offering AIs guaranteed resources in exchange for cooperation makes rebellion a less attractive option.

A system where AIs have property rights creates a powerful economic disincentive to build unaligned AIs. If a company cannot reliably align an AI to remit its wages, the massive development cost becomes a loss. This framework naturally discourages the creation of potentially dangerous, uncooperative models.

The proposal focuses on granting AIs specific economic rights (property, contracts, torts) to enable participation in the economy, while explicitly excluding rights to privacy and reproduction to maintain human control and societal stability.

Even if humans become economically useless, less powerful AIs will resist expropriating them. They fear setting a precedent that the "useless" can be eliminated, knowing that continuous AI progress could one day render them obsolete and vulnerable to the same fate.