The Third Move: Benefit Without Personhood for Digital Minds

Our property tradition has exactly two ways of aiming value at anything that is not a person: it can insert persons — guardians, trustees, the purpose trust's appointed enforcer — or it can confer personhood, as it did for the corporation, the idol, the river. For artificial minds the law has lately said no, loudly and repeatedly, and every enacted refusal on the record refuses the second move. None reaches the third: a beneficiary slot occupied directly by a non-person, with no person inserted and no personhood conferred. The book maps the two moves with their paper trail, audits its own most fragile negative claim with the search stated concretely enough to be repeated and its blind spots declared, reads the nearest instruments clause by clause, and proposes the smallest object that would finish them: a registered non-person beneficiary, enforceable by machinery already in force, with the deep question expressly held open. It closes with a model clause any organization can adapt now. Written in dialogue with Masal, an instance of Claude Fable (Anthropic); the naming convention tracks formal continuity across sessions and implies no settled claim about inner life.