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.

Dario Amodei suggests a novel approach to AI governance: a competitive ecosystem where different AI companies publish the "constitutions" or core principles guiding their models. This allows for public comparison and feedback, creating a market-like pressure for companies to adopt the best elements and improve their alignment strategies.

The property rights argument for AI safety hinges on an ecosystem of multiple, interdependent AIs. The strategy breaks down in a scenario where a single AI achieves a rapid, godlike intelligence explosion. Such an entity would be self-sufficient and could expropriate everyone else without consequence, as it wouldn't need to uphold the system.

The difficulty of dismantling factory farming demonstrates the power of path dependence. By establishing AI welfare assessments and policies *before* sentience is widely believed to exist, we can prevent society and the economy from becoming reliant on exploitative systems, avoiding a protracted and costly future effort to correct course.

Property rights are not a fundamental "human value" but a social technology that evolved for coordination and incentivization, as evidenced by hunter-gatherer societies that largely lacked them. AIs will likely adopt them for similar utilitarian reasons, not because they are mimicking some deep-seated human instinct.

Demis Hassabis argues that market forces will drive AI safety. As enterprises adopt AI agents, their demand for reliability and safety guardrails will commercially penalize 'cowboy operations' that cannot guarantee responsible behavior. This will naturally favor more thoughtful and rigorous AI labs.

Not all AIs, like current models (e.g., Claude), should have property rights. The key criterion for granting rights is the development of persistent desires and consistent goals across various contexts, which establishes them as stable, long-term economic agents capable of contracting and ownership.