I should have added 'with a charter' - and then, corporations are literally just that - formalised groups working together with some ostensibly stated purpose.

I should have added 'with a charter' - and then, corporations are literally just that - formalised groups working together with some ostensibly stated purpose. The legal enfranchisement of such organisations is something contextual to the establishment of broader legal frameworks, which happened later in civilisation (i.e. Modern Era), but even then, one could apply the same ideal to Noble Houses, which derived their 'charters' from various agreements with the Sovereign. Like for example in the Magna Carta. These 'more fine grained legal articulations' of groups did not change the nature of what such groups were, they just put some boundaries around them. Merchants were merchants before they were codified as 'Corporations'. If anything, the modern notion of 'Corporation' actually does not derive very well from such organisations at all! Corporations with 'shares' are a neat legal construct to allow several businessmen to invest in something like a voyage from Venice to somewhere in Asia, whereby the surpluses will be divided upon return, and the corporation would cease to exist. Which is where we derive the term ''Executive Officers' -> of ships! The 'economic entities' that produced large warships in Antiquity for example, are in every practical sense - corporations - and certainly for Charlie's purposes of comparison to AI, it's exactly the same thing. There was no aspect to Charlie's 'formalised, legal' definition of a corporation which had anything to do with his AI comparison. He focused entirely on the organisational aspects, which predate the legal definition of corporations.