Argentina's Senate is doing something few legislatures have attempted: writing algorithms and decentralized autonomous organizations directly into corporate law, not as a side provision but as the centerpiece of a full repeal of the country's foundational companies statute. On August 11, 2026, the Senate's General Legislation Committee, chaired by Senator Nadia Márquez, resumed hearings on the Milei government's General Companies Law bill, sent by the Executive to replace Law 19,550, which has governed Argentine corporations since 1972 (Senado de la Nación). Twelve specialists testified during the session, and the debate produced the clearest public clash yet between the government's deregulatory instincts and Argentina's corporate-law establishment.
What the Bill Actually Creates
Drafted by Deregulation Minister Federico Sturzenegger's team and presented alongside Inspector General of Justice Alejandro Ramírez and Subsecretary Paula Taddei, the bill is the product of more than two years of interagency drafting (Argentina.gob.ar). It rests on five pillars: greater contractual freedom, digitized registration, modernized corporate types, stronger administrator accountability, and technological integration. Two provisions have drawn the most attention. Sociedades Automatizadas ('Automated Companies') are designed to operate through algorithms or AI systems without requiring employees for ordinary business. DAOs — Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, described in the bill as entities that function autonomously via blockchain — would let capital be represented as tokens, accept cryptocurrency as capital contributions, and permit fully digital incorporation and signatures (La Nación).
Critically, Argentina.gob.ar's own summary states the reform does not alter existing civil or criminal liability frameworks — meaning the bill's authors intend AI-run governance to sit on top of, not replace, Argentina's existing accountability rules. Whether that holds up in practice is exactly what the Senate is now arguing about.
Bullrich vs. Nissen
The sharpest exchange came between Senator Patricia Bullrich, the ruling La Libertad Avanza bloc's leader in the chamber, and Ricardo Nissen, the former head of the Inspección General de Justicia (IGJ), Argentina's corporate registrar, under the previous Kirchnerist administration. Nissen told the committee the bill amounts to "the consecration of commercial societies as a trap... so that people with money have more money," arguing its core effect is that businesspeople bear no responsibility for automated decisions (Infobae; Perfil). Bullrich countered that Nissen was arguing from "a strictly political outlook" rather than legal expertise, pointing to restrictions he had imposed on simplified corporate structures by IGJ resolution rather than statute during his tenure — concluding, pointedly, that "the accuser ends up being the accused."
The Case Nissen Is Making Deserves a Fair Hearing
Before dismissing this as reflexive statism, it's worth taking Nissen's underlying argument seriously. Corporate law exists to solve a specific problem: someone has to be answerable when a company harms creditors, employees, or the public. Automated Companies and DAOs are explicitly designed to remove the employees and, in some structures, the identifiable human decision-maker from day-to-day operations. Fiscal Gabriela Boquín, also testifying, flagged what she called contradictory provisions that could weaken consumer protections — a concern any regulator would be right to press on before a novel corporate form scales. And UIF president Matías Álvarez's assurance that the bill "maintains and strengthens" anti-money-laundering standards is worth taking as a starting commitment, not a finished analysis; tokenized equity and algorithmic decision-making are precisely the features that have made AML enforcement harder elsewhere, and Argentina's regulator will need concrete supervisory tooling, not just statutory language, before the claim is tested.
Why the Reform Is Still the Right Call
Even granting those concerns real weight, Law 19,550 is 54 years old — written for an industrial economy before cloud computing, tokenized assets, or software agents existed as governance tools. Attorney Sebastián Balbín's testimony to the committee, that the current framework was "conceived for an economy, technology, and businesses that no longer exist," is simply accurate. The alternative to reform is not stability; it is continuing to force AI-native and blockchain-native ventures to either misrepresent their structure to fit 1972-era categories or incorporate somewhere else entirely — Delaware, Wyoming's DAO LLC statute, or Switzerland's crypto-friendly cantons — taking Argentine tax revenue and jobs with them. A modernized statute that explicitly names and regulates automated entities, rather than pretending they don't exist, gives Argentine regulators more visibility into these structures, not less.
The honest fix is not to reject Sociedades Automatizadas and DAOs outright but to insist the liability-preservation promise in the bill's text is actually enforceable — that a human principal, whether a director, a token-majority holder, or a designated agent, remains identifiable and answerable when an automated entity causes harm. That is a drafting question the committee can resolve in markup; it is not a reason to keep Argentina's corporate law frozen in the Cold War. With no ruling yet issued and the government still working to build opposition consensus before scheduling a floor vote, the committee process is exactly where that fix belongs.