Abstract: The development and application of autonomous artificial intelligence are increasingly reshaping the structures of value creation, income attribution, and risk allocation, thereby presenting the existing tax law system with a novel regulatory challenge of global scope. By reviewing the academic debates over the taxpayer status of autonomous agents, this paper further argues for the legitimacy and rationality of granting autonomous agents relatively independent taxpayer status through nominal legal persons on the basis of the principle that tax burdens should be allocated equitably according to ability to pay, in order to isolate risks and protect the tax base. The jurisprudential basis for using tax law as a regulatory tool for autonomous agents lies in its orientation toward the overall social interest, its value goal of protecting ‘freedom and human dignity’, and its institutional function of guiding conduct toward compliance. By analyzing the fundamental economic purpose, tax policy objectives, and inherent institutional tensions of tax-law regulation of autonomous agents, this paper clarifies that the core function of such regulation is to adopt an approach guided by a harm index, to treat autonomous agents, by legal fiction, as separate taxpayers through what this article terms a ‘nominal legal person’, and to properly design the essential elements of taxation and arrangements for tax collection and administration. On this basis, it proposes a comprehensive governance scheme centered on ‘legal person shares’, while reconstructing the rules governing the allocation of taxing rights among jurisdictions, with a view to ultimately ensuring, on a global scale, that the risks arising from autonomous agents are internalized while the benefits generated by those agents are broadly shared.
Keywords: Autonomous AI Agents; Legal Person Shares; Tax Law as a Regulatory Tool; Principle of Statutory Taxation; Principle of Substantive Taxation; Nominal Legal Person
Author: Xu Duoqi
Source: Xu, D. Q. (2026). Tax Law Regulation of Autonomous Agents. Oriental Law, (4), 119–132.
Publish date: 2026/9/10
Original Link: 
论自主智能体的税法规制_许多奇.pdf
