Miami Law Takes On AI-Run Corporations

Delaware and Argentina are already testing companies run by AI agents. Miami Law gathered scholars to ask who answers when they fail.

Somewhere in a company, an AI agent makes a decision. A creditor loses money. Who answers for it?

The question sounds like science fiction. Yonathan Arbel, a University of Miami law professor, says it is already a live one. “At least two major jurisdictions are now experimenting with some version of the A-Corp: Delaware and Argentina.”

This fall, Arbel brought scholars to Miami Law to start answering it.

What Is an A-Corp?

An A-Corp is an algorithmic corporation. People still own it. AI agents do the work that managers and boards used to do.

The roundtable’s framing says those functions could include management and governance themselves.

That sounds efficient until something goes wrong. Corporate law assumes a human sits at every decision point.

A director owes shareholders duties of care and loyalty. It is unclear how those duties apply when the decision-maker is software.

Arbel’s one-day A-Corps Roundtable asked what happens when that assumption fails. The University of Miami’s news office described the gathering.

Scholars in corporate law, governance and AI policy came to Miami for it. Moderators came from Yale, the University of Houston and Tel Aviv University.

Questions Nobody Can Answer Yet

The group did not chase a single doctrine. It worked through a cluster of problems that all point back to the same gap.

How does an AI agent prove who it is and what it may do? What counts as real human oversight? When should a court trust a decision a machine made?

Money raises harder problems. Creditors, capital rules and insolvency were all built for companies that move at human speed.

An agent can commit funds in seconds, and liability rules were not written for that speed.

Arbel put it plainly. “Nobody knows the rules of the road.”

Then the harder admission: “We don’t even know what questions to ask.”

The day ended with the participants listing themes for further study. They also named priorities for legal reform and questions for future research.

The law school’s Office of Intellectual Life and its Miami Business Law Program sponsored the gathering.

Why the Conversation Started in Miami

The roundtable fits a pattern at Miami Law. The school launched its Law & AI Lab in 2024 as a home for this kind of work.

MAIN has followed that push. We reported on Miami Law faculty writing AI’s rulebook, with Arbel among the three professors profiled.

The lab also built a Bluebook citation tool for lawyers. Its director, Or Cohen-Sasson, has studied why AI alignment gets harder as models improve.

The rules for AI-run corporations do not exist yet, so the questions come first.

The roundtable adds corporate law to that list. Dean Patricia Sanchez Abril opened the day.

Arbel said the school was the natural home for the event.

“Miami Law is a natural home for such forward thinking,” he said.

George Georgiev leads the school’s new business law initiatives. He said scholars in corporate governance and technology law rarely talk to each other.

“The AI-Corporations workshop demonstrated that such dialogue can be both illuminating and generative,” Georgiev said.

Arbel called the exercise “future-proofing our institutions.”

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