Bilinçli AI Doğarsa: Hak mı, Mülkiyet mi?
The debate over artificial consciousness is moving from speculative philosophy toward a practical governance problem. In 2025 and 2026, consciousness researchers gathered in the Galápagos Islands to examine where conscious experience might exist across animals, humans and artificial systems. The 2026 discussions produced no consensus on whether current AI models are conscious; more fundamentally, researchers still disagree about what evidence could settle the question. That uncertainty matters because businesses are not waiting for consciousness science to mature. AI agents are already being described as digital labor, colleagues and members of human-agent teams. If future systems develop credible signs of subjective experience, companies could face a category conflict unlike anything in conventional software governance: a system may create economic value like a worker while remaining legally owned, copied, modified and terminated like property. The article argues that moral status, legal personhood and liability must remain separate questions. Protecting a potentially conscious system from unnecessary suffering would not automatically require giving it full legal personality. Likewise, granting an AI some form of status should not allow developers or deployers to escape responsibility for harms caused by systems they build and operate. The central risk is therefore not merely whether machines can become conscious. It is whether consciousness could emerge before institutions have developed credible methods for identifying it and rules for handling the resulting conflict between ownership, welfare and accountability.