I. Moya and the question no one asks
In February 2026, the Chinese company DroidUp presented Moya in Shanghai. This humanoid robot is 1.65 metres tall, weighs 32 kilograms, maintains eye contact, reproduces micro-expressions, can blush, and maintains a skin temperature between 32 and 36 degrees Celsius to accentuate the sensation of realism during interactions. It walks with 92% biomechanical precision. It is designed not for industrial tasks, but for prolonged and convivial interactions in environments where the human dimension is essential — homes, classrooms, healthcare facilities. It is expected to be commercialised at the end of 2026 at approximately 6,500 euros per unit. The Bank of America estimates that three billion humanoid units of this type could be in service worldwide by 2060.
The press has noted the technological advance. No one has asked the question that this object raises in law and in political economy: what happens when an entity of this type — or its industrial equivalent — becomes the exclusive workforce of a commercial company? What happens to the legal fiction when it no longer has a human substrate? What happens to democratic sovereignty when the capital that produces and accumulates no longer passes through human labour?
This article does not provide legislative proposals. It identifies the structural fault line, which is already open, and poses the questions that the law will inevitably have to answer — whether it chooses to do so in advance or under constraint.
II. The legal person and its human foundation
The legal person — the personne morale of French civil law tradition, the corporation of common law — is a fiction. It does not exist ontologically. It is a tool constructed by the sovereign to allow human beings to act collectively, to limit their individual liability, to give duration to a project that transcends the biological lifespan of its founders. The fiction is always, at its origin, at the service of persons. It has no autonomous existence. It is born by legal act, lives as long as the act subsists, and dies by dissolution, withdrawal, absorption.
The classical legal theory of the legal person presupposes, even without stating it explicitly, a human substrate at some level of the chain. Behind the company, there are shareholders. Behind the shareholders, there are, at some point, physical persons who bear the wealth, who pay taxes on dividends, who vote in elections. The fiction serves as an intermediary between human beings and economic life. It is an instrument of mediation.
The entirely automated company begins to dissolve this presupposition. Not by philosophical rupture, but by progressive structural substitution.
III. The two hypotheses — and the abyss of the second
A. The concealed human: capital without labour
The first hypothesis is already a reality. A company whose entire workforce has been replaced by machines continues to have human shareholders at the top of the chain. The capital is human. The profit rises towards physical persons. This is the model of the major automated platforms: no employees in the classical sense, but founders, shareholders, and fund managers who are identifiable human beings.
The legal and democratic consequence is already serious. This company pays no payroll taxes, contributes to no pension fund, generates no taxable income from labour. It produces value, but this value does not pass through the redistribution mechanisms that wage labour has historically constituted. The automatic redistribution — social contributions, income tax on wages, consumer spending — is suppressed. The capital accumulates for identifiable persons, but without the socioeconomic friction that made capital and labour structurally interdependent.