Born into the Algorithm: Global Law, Cognitive Autonomy, and Children’s Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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Children born today enter a world in which artificial intelligence systems collect, categorize, and predict from the moment of birth, often before any digital engagement and well before the capacity to consent. Existing legal frameworks address children primarily as platform users defined by an age threshold or as natural persons without operational protection during incapacity, and none adequately addresses the newborn as a rights-bearing subject of algorithmic systems from the moment of birth. This paper proposes sovereignty-in-trust as the doctrinal frame within which children’s rights attach at birth and are held in trust during the period before consent capacity, with cognitive autonomy as the substantive content of what is held. The framework is derived from a literature review of the established provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, read with the Committee’s General Comments, supported by data-protection and AI-governance instruments in the European Union, and refined through the supported-decision-making framework of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The paper highlights four key failure modes in current frameworks: regulatory overload, commercial monetization, dependence on political will, and the limitations of current doctrinal structures. It outlines five legal measures to enhance resilience: mandatory disclosure during neonatal data collection, a bankruptcy-proof restriction on transferring data from minors, automatic deletion or anonymization of identity data not explicitly retained, a safeguard against predictive profiling without prior consent, and ongoing ethical reform and liability across the AI product lifecycle. The paper advocates that the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child issue a new General Comment specifically addressing children’s rights in algorithmic systems, with dedicated provisions for the period before children have the capacity to give consent. The doctrinal objective is not to establish a new right but to articulate the operational form of existing rights as they apply to a subject who is currently unable to exercise them at the moment they attach.