Who Owns Your AI Twin?
The most unresolved question in personal AI. What current terms of service actually say, what the law is starting to say, and what a good answer would look like.
7 min read
01Ownership in the current contracts
Most consumer terms of service for AI clone platforms today give the user a license to use the clone they create, while reserving broad rights for the platform: to retain training data, to use derived models, and to continue operating the service if the user leaves.
In practice this means that the artifact called 'your AI twin' is more accurately described as a service the platform performs on your behalf.
02What the law is beginning to recognize
Courts and regulators are starting to treat the model of a person as an extension of the person. Several jurisdictions now require that providers delete personalized model weights when the underlying data is deleted.
A clean separation between 'data' and 'model trained on that data' is no longer legally tenable. The model carries the rights of the data.
03What a fair ownership regime looks like
A defensible regime gives the individual three guarantees: the right to inspect what has been trained on them, the right to revoke and have the model retrained, and the right to take their model with them.
Portability in particular is missing from almost every commercial offering today. It is the single change that would most rebalance the relationship between people and platforms.