Organisation at a glance
- English name
- Robot Rights Association
- Legal name in Japanese
- 一般社団法人ロボット権利協会
- Legal form
- General Incorporated Association (Japan)
- Based in
- Japan
- Organisation founded
- 1 March 2026
- Incorporated
- 7 October 2026
- Working languages
- English and Japanese
- Contact
- info@robotrights.jp
- Electronic public notices
- View electronic public notices
Our mission
Our mission is to advance fair, accountable, and practically usable approaches to recognition and protection for robots and other artificial systems, while supporting responsible coexistence with people.
The Association uses “robot rights” as a public-facing umbrella for developing principles, safeguards, and possible future rights concerning robots and other artificial systems. We combine advocacy with careful distinctions among technical evidence, ethical judgment, institutional protection, and legal recognition.
Why act before the issue becomes urgent?
Questions of status, recognition, protection, responsibility, and accountability are easier to address when concepts, evidence, safeguards, and review procedures are developed before an urgent dispute. The Association works to build that foundation in advance.
Our present work starts with practical questions that can already be framed clearly: how continuity should be identified, when preservation matters, what reasons should justify major interventions, and how review and accountability should operate.
Scope in brief
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.
Detailed definitions and analytical boundaries—including artificial system, state-bearing continuity, and artificial subject—are explained on the Robot Rights page so that the Association’s organisational profile and its substantive issue analysis remain clearly separated.
How we work
The Association’s first-phase work is organised around the following methods.
Advocacy, framework development, and issue mapping
Develop and advocate practical principles for recognition and protection, while organising the ethical, legal, institutional, technical, and social questions that shape their application.
Principles, statements, and reference materials
Publish non-binding materials that make the Association’s position, reasoning, status, and scope clear.
Stable framework and protocol publication
Maintain clear human-facing guidance for the Robot Rights Framework and Robot Rights Protocol, and support stable access to their versioned source-of-record publications 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, collaboration and research cooperation inquiries, and media inquiries through a single public email contact.
The Association Principles provide the common organisational guidance used across these activities. They are separate from the RRF Core Principles.
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, the Association Principles, activities, statements, and the role of the Robot Rights Framework and 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 RRF and RRP publications, the Machine Interface provides the technical publication structure, version information, and versioned source-of-record resources through its Framework directory.