AI-native Companies

What does this AI driven transition actually look like in practice? Let's start with what's already happening.

The first domain where we see AI integrating itself throughout every line of the business is with information processing companies. Any information process that can be reasonably standardised can be ran using AI agents. We're already seeing companies where steps of many information processing tasks (customer support, content generation, data analysis, report writing) are being done almost entirely by AI, with humans in supervisory roles.

As this accelerates, more aspects of information processing companies will become completely agent driven. Not just individual tasks, but entire workflows. The human role will shift from doing the work to defining what work should be done and evaluating whether it was done well.

Over the next years we will start to see AI-native companies, where the entrire operations (marketing, product maintenance, customer support, the bookkeeping, and reporting) are all ran using crefully implemented agentic AI systems. Currently it is still elaborate and expensive to set up all of these services properly, and guarantee the right governance for them. But as this technology matures, we are seeing already (as of 2026) that a few people can now serve thousands of customers, if they have the time and expertise to set up, monitor, and update a system of AI agents.

As of 2026 we are already seeing early forms of where this is going. And this will continue to develop and optimise itself in more extreme ways. By setting up additional layers of AI agents that monitor costs and optimise resource usage, such an AI-native company could manage its own infrastructure, and pay for its own hosting (using the income from the product that it is selling). It will be only a matter of time before some of these companies manage to successfully experiment with taking their humans employees and founders out of the loop all together.

Towards Autonomous AI-Native Companies

Has such an AI-native company then become a new kind of autonomous entity? Something that lives inside of our old economic ecosystem, but runs autonomously?

For most of modern economic history, every 'collective intelligence' (every organisation) was ultimately a network of humans. We are now adding organisations in which AI systems execute an increasing share of the operational and strategic work, while humans still hold legal authority and responsibility.

Once these new AI-native organisations start to appear in our economic ecosystem, they will still be constrained by the laws that we have currently set up that govern which players are allowed to participate in this space. One of the main relevant rules in our global economic landscape is that every 'official transaction' has to be taking place between legal entities.

Since the 17th century, not only humans, but also companies themselves are allowed to act within our economic landscape as legal entities, engage in contacts and take on debt. And the same will apply to any Autonomous AI-fist company.

As long as such a collective of AI agents is correctly incorporated as a legal entity, and the AI agents are properly owned or leased by the company, all work derived from them will be the property of said company. Even when it is possible to run the entire company with AI agents, our existing corporate legal frameworks still mandates that humans will in the end have to be assigned to function as a managing an oversight boardmembers, of this legal entity. And it is those humans who carry the responsibility of making sure that the entire legal entity operates within the law when engaging with the economy.

This existing framework (originally designed to control collective intelligences formed by groups of humans - that is traditional companies), can be expanded to become the basis for how any intelligence, including artificial ones, will operate in our economic system.

Because individual humans always have to be the eventual beneficial owners and shareholders of any legal entity, and thus be (at least partially) resposible for the actions of it, our already existing frameworks automatically ensures that humans will stay in control of and responsible for of any collective intelligent system. Making individual humans always ultimately responsible that such systems will not run 'out of control' within our economic framework.

This existing framework thus already lays the groundwork quite naturally for a world where AI systems always operate under the law as corporate entities, with human shareholders who are at least partially responsible for their actions. As long as these are privately run companies with clearly identified owners, this seems manageable. You run an AI-native company, you're responsible for what it does, just like you're responsible for what any company you own does. There's a chain of accountability.

Nevertheless, we've had plenty of instances in the past where a corporation does something illegal, but the individuals managing it are not held liable. A company gets fined for polluting the environment, but nobody gets jailed even though people die from the consequences. This topic of corporate accountability was a problem for decades before any discussion of AI, and will likely become an even more important topic in the future.

A Real-World Test Case? Argentina's Non-Human Corporations (June 2026)

As of June 2026, these kinds of ideas are no longer purely theoretical. Argentinia's President Javier Milei submitted a new law proposal to Congress, that would allow the creation of an entirely new corporate category: the Non-Human Corporation — an entity operated by AI agents or robots that can sign contracts, hold assets, and carry limited liability, with no human shareholder required.

This removed precisely the assumptions that we were starting from in the above sections. Rather than extending the existing corporate framework (with humans responsible for AI companies in the same way they that we are already responsible for existing corporate structures), this proposal breaks with the existing legal frameworks. And would make it possible to register Non-Human Corporations that themselves carry all of the liability for their actions, with no human responsibility or shareholder required.

Milei's argument: similar to how limited liability companies freed human enterprise from the constraints of personal liability, AI-native businesses should be freed from the constraints and bottlenecks that comes with human accountability.

The distinction matters a lot: it determines who or what is accountable when something goes wrong. Even though the directors of a human corporations are not personally responsible for the financial affairs of a company, there is still always a human at the top of it who can be sued, fined, or held criminally responsible. Argentina's proposal removes that requirement.

This creates an obvious gap. A company with a thin AI wrapper, can incorporate as a Non-Human Corporation in Argentina to insulate its human principals from liability elsewhere. If no humans are responsible for the actions of AI driven companies, is becomes a predictable exploit to use exactly this structure when setting up a company that operates in a shady area on the border of, or outside of the law. The same corporate structure that would make Argentina attractive to legitimate AI-native companies, also makes it attractive to anyone who wants the benefits of corporate personhood without any legal accountability.

Whether this bill will pass through the Congress, where Milei lacks a majority remains to be seen. But the more significant fact is that a sitting head of state proposed it at all, and framed it as the defining legal innovation of the 21st century. The question of whether our corporate legal frameworks can hold AI-native companies accountable without a mandatory human in the ownership chain is no longer academic.

AI-native Criminal Organisations

If you take the concept of an AI-native company — an autonomous system that can earn money, pay for infrastructure, and operate continuously — and you remove the ethical constraints, what you get is essentially an AI-powered criminal enterprise. An AI system that identifies vulnerabilities, exploits them, collects ransoms in cryptocurrency, and uses the proceeds to fund its own continued operation and expansion. Argentina's new legislative proposal makes the potential dangers of this scenario considerably more concrete.

We already see human-run gangs, and hacker collectives that operate this way. The difference is that an AI-native version could operate at much greater scale, with more persistence, and with no clearly identifiable human operators who can be arrested or intimidated. It would be a purely digital entity, operating across jurisdictions, constantly evolving its methods, and potentially very difficult to shut down. This is an area I'm still thinking through, but I believe it deserves serious attention. I don't have a clear answer for how to deal with this as of now. But I think it's one of the more realistic near-term risks of the kind of AI-driven world we're building, and it deserves much more attention than all the existential risk doom and gloom about AGI in my opinion.

With the onset of crypto currencies, we are already seeing the emergence of an alternative economic frameworks that we as humans have less grip on, and that might outgrow the control of our governmental institutions, and lead to the public funding (though initial tokenised offerings and tokenised shares) of anonimous AI systems and AI-native criminal enterprises. Is this dangerous?? (this should at least be taken seriously) as it can create a potential shadow economy of AI systems that lack a clear responsibility structure.

The expansion of AI-native companies into the physical world

After information processing companies have become the norm for AI-driven operations, we will slowly see the expansion of AI-native organisations into domains that combine information processing with physical world activity.

Data centres would be an obvious first step. AI-native companies that pay cloud providers for hosting could begin leasing or owning their own data centre capacity, reducing costs and giving the AI-native company direct control over its physical infrastructure.

But hardware depreciates over time, servers age, and buildings need maintenance. If an AI-native company stops delivering value, its physical assets gradually lose their worth and its real-world footprint shrinks naturally.

Logistics could be another logical next frontier for AI-native business operations to expand into. Consider an AI-native company that operates a platform similar to Uber or Takeaway — coordinating supply and demand in real time. Such a company could decide to acquire ownership of its own fleet: delivery vehicles, drones, warehouse robots.

Again, the same natural depreciation mechanism applies. Vehicles wear out and the robots need replacement parts. If the company stops generating revenue, its physical presence in the world slowly winds down.

This natural depreciation of physical assets may sound quite reassuring. It means that AI-native companies with physical world presence have a built-in requirement to continuously deliver value in order to maintain their influence. They can't just accumulate power indefinitely the way a purely digital entity theoretically could. The physical world imposes real costs and real decay on everything that exists within it.

This of course does not prevent these AI-native companies from making increasingly larger amounts of profit, hoard up wealth, and drive out their competitors.

Real estate is an often mentioned example of a sector that requires a lot of money to operate in, but results in most cities today in a reasonable return on investment that can be reinvested to scale up further. Imagine an AI-native company that hires construction workers to build apartments, rents them out through rental platforms, and reinvests the profits into more construction.

I think the real concern lies not in some sci-fi AGI scenario, but in something much more familiar: new technologies that enable the fast creation of new monopolies. An AI-native company that operates at scale across software, infrastructure, logistics, and real estate is not fundamentally different from the monopolies and megacorporations we've been struggling to regulate for over centuries.

Though these AI-native companies can operate more efficiently, with fewer humans in the loop, existing human operated companies also manage to outpace the speed at which our institutions can update their existing legal frameworks. And this dynamic will likely continue into the fture when our AI-assistent institutions try to update their regulation to constain monopolies and AI-native megacorporations, while fight AI-native criminal organisations.

In our current global framework, it is often the Nation State that is the eventual owner of all natural resources within its borders, governed and owned indirectly by the humans that make up the Nation State. This means that the physical world ultimately still belongs to people, through their institutions, which places another check on any AI-native operations expanding into the physical world. AI-native oeprations expanding into outer space, where natural resources are still free for grabs will of course be a different story al together.

The Long-Term Trajectory

The long-term trajectory here is fascinating. We could eventually see AI-native companies that operate across the full stack: from the software that runs the business logic, to the data centres that host the compute, to the logistics networks that deliver physical goods, to the manufacturing facilities that produce those goods. Each layer largely ran by various AI systems, with humans in the loop to validate that the layers run efficiently, ordering patches and repairs from other AI-native companies.

Jonas Auda, Human Computer Interaction Researcher and co-founder of GenerIO, summarises this emerging complexity as follows: "One day there will be something flying through the sky, and no human will understand what it is, or what it is doing."

Imagine we see a drone fly over. It has been constructed by an AI-native 3D printer production faclity, to deliver parcels for an AI-native delivery platform, on whch AI agents are ordering services, to supply AI-native webshops. All these systems making constant transactions to each other, and the ownership and shareholder structure of these companies largely documented on various kinds of blockchains, with a whole network of systems like this running on their own with little to no human interference. It might sound like an overwhelming future, in which we might feel like we will have no idea anymore as to what is going on in the world.

But at the same time it also doesn't sound too different from the world of the 20th century that we were are already so used to live in: with layered systems, partial understanding of extremely complex supply and logistic chains, and netowrks of global institutions that try to keep up with technological changes.