Who Owns Your Digital Twin?

Artificial intelligence is getting increasingly good at sounding, thinking and even making decisions like us, but as technology continues to advance beyond our initial comprehension, qestions about what control you have over things that used to be innately your own intellectual property have started to become more and more pertinant. That is, questions surrounding AI systems replicating your knowledge, personality, communication style and professional expertise and perhaps most of all, who actually owns that digital version of you.

The idea of a digital twin is no longer limited to factories, machinery or complex infrastructure in the way that it was a few years back. Now, human digital twins are beginning to become more popular and common, with AI-powered replicas built using information about an individual’s behaviour, preferences, memories and even skills. And while the technology could offer some genuinely useful applications, it also raises difficult questions about privacy, identity and ownership that need to be addressed.

More Than Just An AI Assistant

A digital twin of a person is different from a conventional AI assistant, and this is true in a few different respects. Rather than simply responding to instructions, it could be trained to reflect how a particular individual communicates, makes decisions and approaches problems.

In a workplace, for example, an employee’s emails, meeting transcripts, documents and professional knowledge could be used to create an AI replica capable of answering questions or carrying out certain tasks in their style. The potential benefits for businesses include things like the fact that companies could preserve institutional knowledge when experienced employees retire, they could improve succession planning and make expertise available without relying on one individual being constantly present.

But, there’s a significant difference between using someone’s work-related knowledge and creating a digital representation of the person behind it. As Andrew Bratt, writing about the emerging employment law issues in a LinkedIn Article from June 2026, points out, a digital twin could capture much more than an employee’s work product: it might also reflect their judgement, communication style and professional identity. So, what kind of right does an employer have to keep using that replica after the employee leaves?

Can a Company Own a Version of You?

Employers generally have rights over work produced by employees during their employment, but a person’s identity isn’t quite the same as a document, presentation or piece of software. Bratt argues that employers should establish clear agreements around ownership, permitted use and post-employment rights before deploying this technology, because the law has not yet provided straightforward answers to many of these questions.

And the issue extends well beyond the workplace. In an interview with The Pennsylvania Gazette, University of Pennsylvania law professor Jennifer Rothman raises concerns about the way existing intellectual property laws could give companies control over aspects of people’s identities. Rights over someone’s name, image and voice can become complicated when digital replicas are created, licensed or transferred between organisations. Her concern is that legal protections that are actually designed to prevent identity exploitation could inadvertently create opportunities for other parties to control a person’s digital likeness.

What Happens When Your Digital Twin Gets It Wrong?

The trouble with the digital twin thing is that ownership is only part of the problem. Accountability is another big issue that needs to be considered, and that’s something that’s relevant both within the workplace and beyond. That is, if a digital twin makes a misleading statement, gives incorrect advice or makes a decision that damages someone’s reputation, who is and should be responsible? The individual whose information was used to train it, some may say, or perhaps the company that created it or the organisation deploying it. But which is the correct answer?

There are also concerns about consent when it comes to people who may have shared years of emails, photographs, recordings and personal information without ever agreeing that those materials could be used to construct an AI version of themselves.

Digital identity project Tsuka highlights the importance of authentication, privacy and individual control as digital replicas become more sophisticated. If someone can create a convincing representation of another person, establishing whether that representation is genuine and authorised becomes increasingly important.

The Future of Digital Identity

A digital twin could become a valuable extension of someone’s professional or personal identity, and there’s no doubt that it has the potential to offer a significant amount of assitance both in personal and professional endeavours. It could preserve knowledge, make expertise more accessible and offer businesses new ways to work. But, much like anything in life, those benefits come with a responsibility: in this case, to establish clear boundaries around consent, ownership and control.

As AI becomes better at reproducing the way we look, sound, communicate and think, being able to differentiate between using someone’s data and replicating someone’s identity becomes increasingly important. The technology might be able to create a convincing digital version of you, but that doesn’t automatically give the company that built it, the employer that trained it or the platform hosting it the right to control it.