Why Machines Cannot Own Knowledge

Thesis Knowledge ownership is inseparable from responsibility; since machines cannot bear responsibility, they cannot own knowledge. Any system that treats machine outputs as knowledge without human governance is structurally unsound. Abstract Recent advances in large language models have blurred the distinction between text generation and knowledge production, leading to widespread treatment of machine-generated outputs as epistemic artefacts. This paper argues that such treatment is structurally unsound. Knowledge ownership entails authority, responsibility, and liability-properties that cannot be borne by machines. As a result, any system that treats machine outputs as knowledge without explicit human governance creates an authority vacuum that is already observable in practice. Scope Human governance extends to legal non-person entities (NPEs) - including corporations, academic institutions, and other juridical bodies-only insofar as identifiable humans are formally designated to stand in as responsible agents for those entities. In such cases, governance, authority, and knowledge ownership are not exercised by the non-person entity itself, but by humans acting in accountable roles (e.g. directors, officers, principal investigators, editors, or trustees) who can: assert authority over knowledge artefacts, define and constrain scope, correct or withdraw claims over time, and bear legal, institutional, or professional responsibility for reliance and harm. Where no such human stand-in exists, or where responsibility is diffused such that no accountable human can be identified, governance collapses regardless of the entity’s legal status. Academic institutions, libraries, and scholarly repositories legitimately hold and steward knowledge as custodial institutions operating under durable human governance. Their epistemic legitimacy does not arise from autonomous agency, but from established practices of authorship, attribution, review, curation, correction, and retraction, all of which bind knowledge artefacts to accountable human roles and institutional responsibility over time. In this sense, institutions do not displace human knowledge ownership; they mediate and preserve it. This custodial function is a foundational strength of academic infrastructure and is precisely what enables knowledge to remain stable, corrigible, and governable across generations.---This is a non-peer reviewed anchored publication.