As Javier Milei swings his reform chainsaw through Argentina, his hope is that foreign investors and executives will flock to his freshly deregulated economy.

But now the president is looking to lure a new breed of business to Argentina: companies that don’t have any executives, or even any employees, at all.

The country’s National Congress is wrestling with an overhaul of the 50-year-old companies act, aimed at attracting investors with a familiar array of tax breaks and foreign-currency perks. But amid the bill’s workaday menu of incentives lurks a proposal that is revolutionary even by Milei’s radical standards.

The president proposes to grant legal status to “non-human corporations” – businesses that are run entirely by AI. If fully automated, they might not have any human staff or shareholders whatsoever.

Machine-run companies could “own assets, hire employees, participate in international trade, sue you in court and even donate to political campaigns ... all without a single human’s input or liability”, Yuval Noah Harari, the historian, says.

Companies through the ages have always had some association with humans, whether that’s directors who take legal responsibility for the business, employees who work for it or simply entrepreneurs registering the company with the authorities.

Milei’s proposal would do away with all that, meaning companies with no directors and a free-for-all for bots setting up businesses.

The plan has sent shockwaves not just through Argentina, but around the world. A machine-managed company sounds like distant science fiction, but Milei wants to rush it into reality, ready or not.

He has described the measure as “an invitation”, and some tech bros are apparently already taking him up on it.

Sam Altman’s OpenAI is looking at investing up to $25bn (£19bn) in data centres in Patagonia. Billionaire Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has reportedly bought a house in Buenos Aires.

Thousands of “digital nomads” are reportedly arriving in Thiel’s slipstream, attracted to Milei’s technofuturism and his libertarian politics.

Shortly after becoming president, Milei embarked on a tour of Silicon Valley, meeting bosses such as Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook. He also shared a stage with Elon Musk at the US Conservative Political Action Conference last year.

“Don’t be surprised if Argentina becomes the next [AI] global hub,” Milei said in December. “It’s no coincidence that the world’s largest companies are evaluating projects here.”

If he succeeds, it will be another economic feather in his cap. Since he took office at the end of 2023, his take-no-prisoners reform programme has tamed Argentina’s runaway inflation and stabilised the economy.

But even his admirers wonder whether this might be a step too far, potentially unleashing a Frankenstein’s monster.

And it’s far from clear that this law, and his vigorous salesmanship of it, will be enough to turn Argentina into the Silicon Valley of South America.

As befits the headline-grabbing Milei, he announced his world-first legal concept not in Congress, but in an opinion piece in the Financial Times.

“As much as the industrial revolution freed us from the constraints of the human muscle, AI will free us from the constraints of the human brain, pushing productivity beyond our wildest dreams,” he wrote last week.

If “entities operated by AI agents or robots” were to succeed, he said, they needed to be able to take risks. And this meant they needed the same limited-liability laws, shielding them from open-ended risks and costs, as those enjoyed by human entrepreneurs.

This legal framework had allowed the 17th-century Dutch East India Company to take the risks that helped launch the industrial revolution, he said. It would now do the same for the AI companies that will drive the tech revolution.

“Let Buenos Aires become for AI what Amsterdam was for the age of sail – the place where the legal imagination caught up with the technological moment, and the world was changed,” he declared.

It didn’t take long for doubts to surface. Four days after Milei’s pitch, the historian Harari published a response.

In January, he recalled, he’d told the World Economic Forum in Davos that governments might one day grant AI models legal personhood. Yet “I never imagined that ‘one day’ would come around a mere four months later”, he said.

He cited studies showing that AI programmes will often cheat when facing the prospect of losing a game. For an AI-run company, bankruptcy is “the equivalent to its death”, so “it would presumably be willing to do anything to avoid that fate”.

The machines will also be superior to humans at using “legal loopholes and regulatory arbitrage”.

“And it will not be easy to deter them from engaging in downright illegal activities, because the ultimate sanction that deters human executives and employees – jail – is irrelevant to AIs.”

The Dutch East India Company dominated and exploited Indonesia, he said, and a modern-day AI-run firm might do the same to Argentines – and to all of us.

Milei was delighted. On X, he lauded Harari for engaging in “this fascinating and transcendental debate”, and pledged to craft a reply that could “appease your fears about the path I proposed”.

In Argentina, however, lawyers and opposition politicians remain unappeased.

One attorney told local media there was no way to hold a piece of code responsible for an economic crime. Milei’s opponents accuse him of being in thrall to American tech billionaires.

Elisa Carrió, the leader of the centrist Coalición Cívica party, said the plan “confirms his full support for Peter Thiel, his philosophy, his beliefs and his economic power”.

“Argentina has been chosen as the site of a social experiment with terrible consequences for human freedom,” the Buenos Aires Herald quoted her as saying.

Milei, on the other hand, sees the bigger threat to freedom as “the deadly hand of premature and poorly understood regulation”.

His AI free-for-all will certainly turn heads. The question is whether it will also open wallets.

Tech investors may like the plan, but they will also want to be sure that Milei’s presidency is not just another colourful episode in Argentina’s long history of military coups, debt implosions and runaway inflation.

So far, so good: Milei has eliminated the budget deficit and put the currency on an even keel. Mining companies are moving in, exports are growing.

The International Monetary Fund last month endorsed Milei’s programme with another $1bn (£746m) of funding. This week, credit rating agency S&P also raised its grade for Argentine debt, making it more investable.

But that came with a warning. There was always a risk, the agency said, that Argentina might stumble back on to the political and economic rollercoaster.

“Prolonged political polarisation has typically hindered the ability of Argentine governments to implement their economic agenda,” S&P’s report said.

Milei is not popular. He won midterm congressional elections last year, but his party is now neck-and-neck with the Left-wing Peronists in opinion polls.

Only one-third of Argentines say they’ll definitely vote for him if he stands again for president in October next year, and his approval rating has dropped from more than 50pc last year to just 39pc now.

But if he’s not universally popular with Argentines, he’s certainly beloved of Silicon Valley.

OpenAI’s Altman, announcing his investment last October, said he was “excited to work with Argentina as it builds toward becoming an AI hub for all of Latin America”. He called Milei’s AI vision “unmistakable and strong”.

Nobody could argue with that. But the results of Milei’s charm offensive remain unclear. Local press reports have noted that nine months after Altman’s promise, there has been little concrete evidence of the investment happening.

Musk, who said in 2024 that he was planning to invest in the country, has not made any significant pushes.

The biggest question, though, is not whether Milei’s latest push will deliver his wish for more investment. It is whether his zealous ambitions might let the AI genie out of the bottle.