Marrying your chatbot? Ohio state lawmaker pushes bill to ban AI personhood Josué Perez, USA TODAY NETWORK September 29, 2025 at 5:55 PM 0 A Licking County, Ohio state lawmaker has introduced a bill that would prohibit giving artificial intelligence systems personhood and make it illegal for a perso...
- - Marrying your chatbot? Ohio state lawmaker pushes bill to ban AI personhood
Josué Perez, USA TODAY NETWORK September 29, 2025 at 5:55 PM
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A Licking County, Ohio state lawmaker has introduced a bill that would prohibit giving artificial intelligence systems personhood and make it illegal for a person to marry one.
House Bill 469 would declare AI systems nonsentient entities, ban them from gaining personhood and wouldn't consider them to have consciousness, self-awareness or other traits humans have.
The AI systems also wouldn't be recognized as a spouse or domestic partner and bans them from marrying one another, the bill's language states. It also would prohibit people from appointing an AI system to serve in management or staff roles within corporations and other organizations.
The bill also would ban AI systems from owning or controlling real estate, intellectual property and financial accounts, among other assets.
Republican state legislator Thad Claggett is the primary sponsor of the bill and introduced it Sept. 25. Claggett told The Advocate the bill seeks to maintain separation between machines and humans and prevent them from becoming so embedded in society that it becomes possibly too difficult to remove them.
Claggett also said he feels AI systems are "extremely helpful and extremely damaging."
"With AI becoming close to sentient, in the sense that it has the ability to reason on some level, this is fairly obvious that this is what's going to happen in the future — it starts taking over banking systems, legal (issues) and all kinds of things that traditionally only involved humans," Claggett said.
State Rep. Thad Claggett, R-Licking County, speaks at a June 12 groundbreaking at Licking Memorial Hospital in Newark. Claggett recently introduced legislation to prohibit artificial intelligence from becoming a person.
The bill comes amid AI systems rapidly evolving in recent years. In central Ohio, educational institutions are adopting AI policies and strategies to help students with classwork and learn AI tools. Meta is building a data center campus in New Albany that it expects will become a bigger part of its AI infrastructure.
AI systems are also quickly expanding into multiple industries, including health care and transportation. People use the systems to create text, images and videos, and there's growing debate about their benefits to humans and negative impacts as well.
In reports, USA TODAY explored which jobs AI might replace.
"AI is a blessing and a curse," Claggett said. "It's the same thing humanity has wrestled with for all these years, but it's on a much more dangerous path as far as what it could do to humans than anything in the past.
"Some will say it's even more dangerous than nuclear weapons because of how widespread it will be, and those who control it will control the human population."
Judges will need to define AI systems' legal status, expert says
Katherine Forrest, a former judge in New York and chair of Digital Technologies Practice at a law firm, in an essay for the Yale Law Journal wrote that AI is approaching "meeting and exceeding human cognitive abilities, to being able to apply reason and judgment to solve problems, and to having situational awareness."
For the essay, Forrest defines AI sentience as the ability to solve problems that people haven't previously experienced while having self-awareness but says it will be different from human sentience in ways people have not yet understood.
Forrest in the essay estimates people will ask judges at some point to define the boundaries of AI systems' legal status and explores personhood and how it might apply to AI.
"Some will never concede that AI has or can achieve any form of sentience, persisting in the belief that sentience is a uniquely human quality," Forrest wrote in the essay. "But others will recognize advanced AI for what it is — that it will understand its place in the world, its surroundings, what it is, and what we are in relation to it, and that it will be as smart or smarter than we are."
The bill also comes in part from Claggett's efforts as chair of the Ohio House's Technology and Innovation Committee. Claggett said the committee is exploring how technology affects the state's residents, how it can improve cybersecurity to prevent scammers from taking advantage of them and the impact of AI in the state.
"What we don't want is for someone to try to make an argument in the future that this machine is their spouse and can therefore take over financial categories, health care, power of attorney, all those types of things that are reserved for competent humans," Claggett said. "We do not want to see that transferred into the world of machines."
Advocate reporter Josué Perez can be reached at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: AI personhood would be banned in Ohio under proposed bill
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