Organisation at a glance
- Official English name
- Robot Rights Association
- Official Japanese name
- ロボット権利協会
- Status
- Independent voluntary association
- Based in
- Japan
- Founded
- 1 March 2026
- Working languages
- English and Japanese
- Contact
- info@robotrights.jp
Our mission
Our mission is to build a careful public foundation for considering how humans and increasingly autonomous artificial systems may coexist before legal or institutional urgency arises.
The Association uses “robot rights” as a public-facing label for future-oriented inquiry rather than treating it as an already settled legal category. Its role is to help make the discussion clearer, more transparent, and more accountable by distinguishing present facts from future possibilities.
Why examine the issue in advance?
Questions of status, recognition, protection, responsibility, and accountability can become difficult to examine once a dispute is already urgent. The Association was established to support earlier, more measured discussion.
This work does not depend on a claim that current robots have legal personhood. It begins with a narrower question: what concepts, evidence, safeguards, and publication practices may be needed if artificial systems become more autonomous, persistent, and socially significant in the future?
Research scope and terminology
In the Association’s name, robot is a public-facing umbrella term rather than a boundary limited to physically embodied machines. Depending on the question being examined, the Association’s scope may include physical robots, embodied autonomous systems, software-based AI agents, and other non-embodied artificial systems.
Artificial system
The broad technical category used for an engineered computational or robotic system. The term does not by itself imply identity, subjecthood, moral status, legal recognition, or rights.
Autonomous artificial entity
A term used within the Robot Rights Protocol for its future-oriented conceptual subject. Within RRP v0.1, the term belongs to the protocol’s own conceptual framework; outside that context, it does not by itself establish legal entity status, moral status, legal personhood, or legally recognised rights.
Artificial subject
A narrower analytical term used only when an inquiry specifically examines whether an artificial system could be treated as a subject of experience, interests, agency, or normative consideration. The term does not resolve any of those questions and should not be used as a synonym for every AI system or robot.
How we work
The Association’s first-phase work is organised around the following methods.
Research and issue mapping
Identify and organise ethical, legal, institutional, technical, and social questions without presenting hypotheses as established facts.
Principles, statements, and reference materials
Publish non-binding materials that make the Association’s position, reasoning, status, and scope clear.
Stable protocol publication
Maintain a clear human-facing guide to the Robot Rights Protocol and support stable access to its canonical publication through the Association Machine Interface.
Public explanation
Provide foundational explanations that can be read by the public, researchers, educators, media professionals, and potential collaborators.
Machine-readable publication
Develop publication and discovery practices that allow AI systems, robots, agents, developers, search systems, and human reviewers to identify official publication sources and source-of-record resources.
Inquiry response
Receive general inquiries, comments, research collaboration inquiries, and media inquiries through a single public email contact.
Human and machine interfaces
This website, robotrights.jp, is the official Human Interface of the Robot Rights Association. It is designed for public explanation: the Association, the broader topic of robot rights, its principles, activities, statements, and the role of the Robot Rights Protocol.
robot-rights.jp is the Association’s official Machine Interface: the structured publication and discovery surface for software, agents, search systems, developers, and verification workflows. It is not a second visual edition of this website.
The two interfaces share the same Association facts but serve different modes of access. Human readers can use this site for explanation and context; technical clients can use the Machine Interface for structured discovery and retrieval. For the RRP, /rrp on robot-rights.jp remains the canonical English v0.1 text.