Who Owns That? Evaluating Ownership Intuitions in Large Language Models

Abstract

Ownership establishes rights over the use, control, and transfer of objects. Understanding these relations is essential for AI systems to interact appropriately with people and their resources. Yet how large language models (LLMs) attribute ownership under competing claims remains unclear. We introduce the Competing Ownership Attribution Task (COAT), comprising 42 scenarios, and compare ownership allocations from 24 LLM configurations with those of 108 human participants. Overall, human-model similarity is close to human-human similarity, but models show greater homogeneity in their ownership judgments. Within individual answers, models also divide ownership more evenly among claimants than humans do. Pooling responses across model configurations reveals more scenarios with a shared judgment and fewer with distinct viewpoint groups than in humans. When humans form distinct groups, models may converge on one viewpoint or between competing viewpoints. Further comparisons reveal different contextual sensitivities. As material value increases across scenarios, allocations to creators decline less sharply in models than in humans. Across scenarios differing in public recognition of later holders as owners, allocations to these holders increase in models but decrease slightly in humans. Together, these findings suggest that the evaluated LLM responses do not fully capture the diversity of participants' ownership judgments or how those judgments vary across situations. Developing socially capable AI therefore requires moving beyond overall similarity to capture the diversity and context dependence of human judgments.