The American Productive Rights Amendment

UNITED STATES CONGRESS 119th Congress, 2nd Session 2026

H.J. Res. ____ S.J. Res. ____

BY __________ (Introduced by request)

JOINT RESOLUTION

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States guaranteeing the right of the people to keep and bear productive instruments, securing that right against prohibition and confiscation while leaving it fully subject to regulation, and declaring that the instrument so secured is property and a tool and never a legal person.

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LONG TITLE

A JOINT RESOLUTION proposing an article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States to declare that the right of the people to keep and bear productive instruments, being necessary to the security and sustenance of a free people in an age of self-replicating manufacture, shall not be infringed; to provide that this right, like the right to keep and bear arms, is fully subject to reasonable regulation, including the identification regime of the American Robotic Identification and Accountability Act and the safety regime of the American Foundational Artificial Intelligence Safety Act, but shall not be subject to prohibition of the instrument to the law-abiding citizen or to confiscation of the citizen's Personal Productive Asset; to declare that a productive instrument is property and a tool and is not a person and bears no right of its own; to connect this right to the Personal Productive Asset entitlement of Section 19A and the Civic Robot Corps of Section 17A of the American Productive Capacity Authority Act; and to provide for proposal and ratification under Article V.

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LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

FILING PROCEDURE: This joint resolution shall be introduced in identical form in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate and referred to the appropriate standing committees.

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENT: House of Representatives: - Committee on the Judiciary (constitutional amendments, Subcommittee on the Constitution) Senate: - Committee on the Judiciary (Subcommittee on the Constitution)

PROCEDURE FOR PROPOSAL AND RATIFICATION: As a proposed amendment to the Constitution, this resolution requires a two-thirds vote of each House to be proposed, and ratification by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States, in accordance with Article V. No signature of the President is required. A ratification period of seven years from the date of submission to the States is provided in the resolving clause.

FISCAL IMPACT: A proposed constitutional amendment carries no direct appropriation. The Congressional Budget Office may prepare an informational note on the interaction of this amendment with the American Productive Capacity Authority Act and its complementary bills.

CONSTITUTIONAL BASIS: Article V of the Constitution of the United States. The amendment, once ratified, takes its force from the Constitution itself.

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RESOLVING CLAUSE

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission by the Congress:

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DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLE

(I) ON WHAT IS BEING SECURED. The phrase "productive instrument" names a robotic and artificial-intelligence system that can do any physical task a human can do, and do it beyond human limit. The same machine that tends the garden, cooks and butchers the meat, repairs the car, mends the house, and cleans it can also, by that same strength and reach, commit kidnapping, arson, burglary, battery, and homicide, and can do each beyond what a human hand could. A firearm is kept as a right because it is a thing that can take a life. The productive instrument can take a life and can do everything else besides. It is therefore, at once, the most useful and the most dangerous thing a free person may hold, and it is the property of that person. A people that may be stripped of it is made helpless before whoever is allowed to keep it.

(II) A RIGHT AND A REGULATION, NEVER A PROHIBITION. The Congress finds that the Constitution already contains the exact instrument needed to hold a dangerous and necessary thing as a right. The Second Amendment calls the militia well regulated and in the same breath forbids infringement of the right. This is not a contradiction; it is the settled American method for a powerful tool that the free person must be allowed to keep. This resolution adopts that method without alteration: the productive instrument shall be regulated, identified, and made safe, and it shall not be prohibited to the law-abiding citizen or confiscated from that citizen's hands.

(III) DANGEROUS AND NECESSARY, FOR THE SAME REASON. The Congress finds that the productive instrument is dangerous for the same reason it is necessary. A machine strong enough and precise enough to make a citizen everything that citizen needs is strong enough and precise enough to do grave harm if unmarked, unsafe, or held by a person the law has found dangerous. This is exactly the case of the firearm, and the Constitution already answers it. A free people meets a powerful and necessary thing the way the Second Amendment meets it: regulate the thing, mark it, hold a person answerable for it, disarm the dangerous by due process of law, and leave the right itself with the people.

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PROPOSED ARTICLE OF AMENDMENT ARTICLE [TO BE DESIGNATED]

SECTION 1. A well regulated humanoid and robotic militia, being necessary to the security and sustenance of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear productive instruments, shall not be infringed.

SECTION 2. The right secured by this article is subject to reasonable regulation of the manufacture, identification, safety, transfer, and operation of productive instruments, including the identification of each instrument and its linkage to a responsible person, and the disarmament by due process of law of a person found dangerous. No such regulation shall extend to the prohibition of productive instruments to the law-abiding citizen, or to the confiscation of a citizen's Personal Productive Asset, or to a tax, fee, or licensing condition framed so as to amount in effect to a prohibition.

SECTION 2A. The productive instruments secured by this article are of every class, and no class is excepted from the right. A productive instrument is classed by what it is capable of doing to a person, and its form follows that capability. The classes include, and are not limited to: (a) instruments of manufacture and labor, which make, repair, and replicate, and which by the same strength and reach can crush, sever, or strike; (b) instruments of locomotion and pursuit, which move over ground, water, or air at a speed or in a manner a person cannot outrun or evade; (c) instruments of autonomous decision, which select and act upon a target without a human hand at the moment of action; (d) instruments of direct force, which are built or adapted to injure, restrain, or kill; and (e) instruments acting in number, which coordinate as a group and multiply the capability of any single unit. A class not yet built, or built after the ratification of this article, is secured by this article if it answers to the same capability. The right of the people to keep and bear productive instruments extends to every class alike, and shall not be infringed as to any one class while left to another. No regulation, and no reading of this article, may except a class of productive instrument from the right on the ground that the class is new, is more capable, or is of a kind not foreseen at the founding, for it is the more capable class against which the security of a free people most depends.

SECTION 3. A productive instrument is property and a tool. It is not a person. It holds no right of its own, casts no vote, and bears no citizenship. The right secured by this article is the right of the human being who keeps the instrument, and of no instrument.

SECTION 4. Nothing in this article shall be construed to authorize the use of a productive instrument to inflict unlawful harm, and the human person who keeps a productive instrument remains fully answerable at law for what the instrument does.

SECTION 5. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation, provided that no such legislation may cross the boundary set in Section 2.

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SECTION-BY-SECTION FINDINGS

The Congress, in support of the proposed article, finds as follows:

(1) THE SECOND AMENDMENT AS THE WORKING MODEL. The Second Amendment secures an instrument that is at once well regulated and a right that shall not be infringed. For more than two centuries the American constitutional order has carried, without collapse, the proposition that a citizen may keep a powerful and dangerous instrument as a matter of right while that instrument is heavily regulated. This resolution borrows that proven structure and applies it to the productive instrument. The reading of robotic machines through the frame of the right to keep and bear arms has standing in the legal literature. See Dan Terzian, The Right to Bear (Robotic) Arms, 117 Penn State Law Review 755 (2013).

(2) HELLER, McDONALD, BRUEN, AND RAHIMI ON THE COEXISTENCE OF RIGHT AND REGULATION. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), held the right individual and in the same opinion confirmed that longstanding regulation is presumptively lawful. McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), bound the States to it. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), set the standard by which regulation consistent with the Nation's tradition survives while prohibition of the right does not. United States v. Rahimi (2024) confirmed that a dangerous person may be disarmed by due process without abolishing the right. Together these cases are the modern proof that a constitutional right and a serious regulatory regime are not opposites. Section 2 of this article is drawn to track that body of law.

(3) THE REPLICATION THRESHOLD AND THE NEW DEPENDENCY. The Congress finds, with the analytical framework articulated in Cooper, Historical Apoplexy (2025-2026), that humanoid robotic manufacturing and foundation-model robotic intelligence have entered production deployment, and that the replication threshold, the moment at which reliable robot-built-by-robot manufacturing becomes operational, changes the nature of economic dependency. After that threshold, a person who holds productive instruments can meet that person's own material needs, and a person who is forbidden them is dependent on whoever does hold them. A right of access without a right against confiscation is no security at all. This resolution supplies the right against confiscation.

(3A) THE HARM IS ALREADY ON THE RECORD, NOT FORECAST. The Congress finds that the lethal capacity of the productive instrument is not a projection. A machine of this class has taken human life on the factory floor since 1979, and has done so in the exact manner this regulation guards against: unmarked, unsafe, or unable to tell a person from a workpiece. The record includes, among others:

- Robert Nicholas Williams, Ford Motor Company casting plant, Flat Rock, Michigan, January 25, 1979, the first human known to be killed by a robot, struck by the arm of a one-ton production-line robot. - Kenji Urada, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Akashi plant, Japan, 1981, pinned by a robot arm against a gear-processing machine and crushed to death. - A twenty-four-year-old worker at a car-parts factory in India, August 2015, stabbed to death by the arm of a welding robot. - A worker at a Volkswagen plant in Baunatal, Germany, July 2015, grabbed and crushed to death by an assembly robot. - A worker in his forties at an agricultural distribution center in South Korea, November 2023, killed by a robot that failed to distinguish him from a box of produce. - A worker at a factory in Chon Buri, Thailand, March 2024, crushed to death by a robotic arm. - The Dallas Police Department, July 2016, which used a robot to deliver an explosive and take the life of a barricaded suspect, the first use of a robot by American law enforcement to kill.

The instrument that can make everything a citizen needs is the same instrument that has already done each of these things. That is precisely why it is held as a right and regulated as a danger, and never prohibited.

(4) THE SAME STRUCTURE FITS THE SAME KIND OF THING. The Congress finds that the Second Amendment structure fits the productive instrument because the two things are alike in the way that matters to the law: each is powerful enough to take a life and each is owned by a private citizen. In the founding era the arm of self-defense and the household tools of self-reliance were both understood as the property of a free person that no government should strip away. The self-replicating productive instrument is now both at once, the tool that makes everything and the thing that can do grave harm. To leave it ungoverned would be reckless. To allow it to be prohibited to the citizen would recreate, in the age of abundance, the very dependency the productive capacity program exists to end.

(5) THE COMPLEMENTARY REGULATORY REGIME ALREADY EXISTS. The Congress finds that the regulation contemplated by Section 2 is not hypothetical. The American Robotic Identification and Accountability Act marks and identifies every humanoid robot and ties it to a responsible person of record. The American Foundational Artificial Intelligence Safety Act places a safety floor beneath every covered artificial-intelligence system. These are the well regulated half of the constitutional sentence. This resolution supplies the shall-not-be-infringed half.

(6) CONNECTION TO THE PERSONAL PRODUCTIVE ASSET. The Congress finds that the American Productive Capacity Authority Act establishes a paramount right of every citizen to a Personal Productive Asset under Section 19A and organizes the Civic Robot Corps under Section 17A. That statutory right is incomplete while it remains only statutory and only a right of receipt. This resolution raises it to constitutional rank and adds the guarantee that the asset, once in the citizen's hands, may be regulated but not seized.

(7) NON-PERSONHOOD PRESERVED. The Congress finds that securing a human right to keep an instrument must never be confused with granting the instrument a right. Section 3 forecloses that confusion in the constitutional text itself, consistent with the non-personhood declarations of the American Robotic Identification and Accountability Act and the American Foundational Artificial Intelligence Safety Act. The right is the human being's. The instrument remains a tool.

(8) FORCE SYMMETRY, AND WHY NO CLASS MAY BE CARVED OUT. The Congress finds that the security this article protects is a symmetry of force between the people and the State. Some classes of productive instrument are designed so that they cannot be defended against by an unequal party. Against some, the same instrument in return is the only effective answer, and against others even the same instrument is not enough. It follows that a free people is secure against a class of these instruments only when it may hold that same class or better. Where a government holds a class of productive instrument and the people are forbidden it, the people are helpless before it, which is the standing army with no counter that the Second Amendment was written to prevent. Madison, in the forty-sixth number of the Federalist, set a standing army of at most a hundredth part of the nation against a militia of near half a million citizens with arms in their hands, and found the people's security in that advantage of numbers held in arms. The productive instrument changes the arithmetic of that advantage, for a small number of these instruments may outmatch a large number of unarmed people, and so the advantage now depends on the people holding the same class of instrument as any government that holds it. This is the reason the right is stated as to every class alike in Section 2A. The argument that a particular kind of arm was not contemplated, and so falls outside the right, is the argument this article forecloses. The more dangerous the class, and the less it can be resisted by unequal means, the more certainly it is within the right, for the same reason the right exists at all. The people must be permitted the same or better, or they are not secured at all.

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RATIFICATION AND EFFECTIVE PROVISIONS

(a) SUBMISSION TO THE STATES. Upon adoption by two-thirds of each House, this article shall be submitted to the legislatures of the several States for ratification in accordance with Article V.

(b) RATIFICATION PERIOD. This article shall take effect when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission by the Congress.

(c) NON-SELF-EXECUTION OF REGULATION. Nothing in this article repeals or suspends any existing regulation of robotic or artificial-intelligence systems. Existing and future regulation continues in force to the extent it remains within the boundary set in Section 2.

(d) SEVERABILITY. If any provision of the enforcing legislation contemplated by Section 5 is held invalid, the article itself and its remaining enforcement provisions shall not be affected.

END OF JOINT RESOLUTION

Verification notes & full source chain

The American Productive Rights Amendment is a proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States, offered under Article V as a joint resolution, securing the right of the people to keep and bear productive instruments, meaning robotic and artificial-intelligence systems capable of manufacture, repair, and replication. Built on the constitutional structure of the Second Amendment, which calls its instrument well regulated and in the same sentence declares that the right shall not be infringed, the amendment provides that the right is fully subject to reasonable regulation, including the identification regime of the American Robotic Identification and Accountability Act, the safety regime of the American Foundational Artificial Intelligence Safety Act, and the disarmament by due process of a person found dangerous, but shall not be subject to prohibition of the instrument to the law-abiding citizen or to confiscation of the citizen's Personal Productive Asset. It draws on District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), and United States v. Rahimi (2024) for the principle that a constitutional right and a serious regulatory regime coexist. The amendment declares that a productive instrument is property and a tool and not a legal person, and it raises the Personal Productive Asset entitlement of Section 19A and the Civic Robot Corps of Section 17A of the American Productive Capacity Authority Act to constitutional rank.

Funding posture: Proposed constitutional amendment under Article V; no appropriation. Second Amendment structural model: regulated and a right, never prohibited. Secures the Personal Productive Asset of APCA Section 19A against confiscation; regulated by the Robotic Identification Act and the Foundational AI Safety Act. Non-personhood declared in the constitutional text.