Truby and Kantiana ask whether AI-enabled longevity technologies might require recognition of an international legal right to extended life.Reference Truby and Kantiana ¹ Their question is timely, but it may also be misframed. The harder problem is not whether international law should recognize a right to live to 120. It is whether law can prevent AI longevity from converting time itself into a luxury good.

The authors are right that AI-driven geroscience unsettles familiar categories: treatment and enhancement, disease and aging, prevention and immortality, individual entitlement and collective sustainability. Their most valuable contribution is to bring longevity out of speculative bioethics and into the legal architecture of human rights, scientific progress, sustainable development, and intergenerational equity. Yet the article remains too attached to the idiom of individual rights. That idiom is powerful when states deny essential care or arbitrarily expose people to premature death. It is less adequate when the object being distributed is not a discrete medicine, but a shifting bundle of data, prediction, biological risk scoring, patented interventions, insurance incentives, employment norms, and social expectations about what counts as a “normal” life course.

A right to longevity, if framed as a claim to life-extension technologies, risks becoming a right for those already positioned to enjoy long lives. The legal imagination should instead turn toward what might be called time justice: the fair distribution of socially produced chances to live a healthy, meaningful life across the life course. This reframing does not reject Truby and Kantiana’s rights-based analysis. It radicalizes it. The deepest inequity in longevity is not future exclusion from AI-designed senolytics; it is the present theft of healthy years through poverty, racism, environmental exposure, incarceration, unsafe work, poor housing, inadequate primary care, and unequal access to prevention. This theft is already measurable: in the United States, Chetty and colleagues found that life expectancy at age forty differed by roughly fifteen years for men and ten years for women between the richest and poorest one percent of the income distribution, and that this gap widened between 2001 and 2014.Reference Chetty ² If law begins with futuristic access to rejuvenation, it may miss the fact that many communities are still waiting for the social conditions that make ordinary aging survivable — and that the “longevity divide” Truby and Kantiana place in the future is, for millions, already a feature of the present.

Truby and Kantiana treat aging’s legal classification as a threshold question: is aging a treatable condition for purposes of the right to health?Reference Truby and Kantiana ¹ But health law should be wary of letting regulatory strategy masquerade as ontology. Aging may be medicalized because doing so creates a pathway for investment, approval, reimbursement, and market formation. This contest is neither hypothetical nor confined to human rights fora; it is already underway in regulatory science. Because the US Food and Drug Administration does not recognize aging itself as an indication, the Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial was deliberately designed to show that aging can be treated like a disease, using a composite endpoint of age-related morbidities rather than aging as such.Reference Barzilai ³ The legal status of aging is therefore being settled downstream — through trial design, endpoint selection, and reimbursement criteria — precisely the administrative venues where health lawyers know definitional battles are actually won. That does not mean law must accept the metaphysical claim that aging is simply a disease. Nor should law cling to the opposite claim that aging is merely “natural.” The natural/disease binary is a trap. Pregnancy, disability, menopause, neurodiversity, and dying have all shown how law can distort human experience when it governs through crude biological categories. The better question is functional and distributive: when does an aging-related intervention prevent avoidable loss of capability, and who benefits from defining that loss as a medical problem?

AI makes this question more urgent because AI longevity will likely arrive first not as a dramatic life-extension pill, but as measurement. Biological age clocks, multimodal risk scores, genomic profiles, wearable data, and predictive analytics may become the infrastructure through which people are sorted long before any intervention reliably adds decades of life.Reference Lyu ⁴ The first “longevity divide” may therefore be epistemic rather than therapeutic. Some people will receive refined predictions, personalized prevention, and early access to trials; others will be rendered invisible by nonrepresentative datasets or overclassified as biologically risky.Reference Chu ⁵ The law must not wait for rejuvenation therapies to mature before regulating the actuarial power of longevity AI. ⁶

This suggests a first concrete intervention: a firewall around biological age data. Biological age estimates should be treated as high-risk health information, not as wellness trivia. Employers, insurers, lenders, immigration authorities, and educational institutions should be barred from using biological age scores unless a narrow, health-protective justification is established. The lesson from genetic nondiscrimination law is incomplete but instructive: prediction can become punishment when institutions convert probabilistic biology into eligibility criteria. ⁷ AI longevity governance should therefore include a “right not to be prematurely antiquated” — a right not to have one’s opportunities reduced because an algorithm claims that one’s cells, face, gait, voice, genome, or social history indicate accelerated aging.

A second intervention is to detach public support for longevity research from the fantasy of heroic individual rescue. Public funding, tax incentives, data access, and regulatory privileges should be conditioned on measurable equity obligations. ⁸ If publicly supported datasets, academic medical centers, or national biobanks help train commercial longevity models, the resulting products should carry public-return duties: affordable licensing, equitable trial recruitment, benefit-sharing with data-contributing communities, and transparent validation across age, race, sex, disability, geography, and socioeconomic status. These duties should not stop at national borders. Longevity science is, at bottom, a bioprospecting enterprise: its raw materials include the genomes of long-lived cohorts, senolytic compounds drawn from biodiverse ecosystems, and the cell lines of uniquely afflicted individuals — inputs often concentrated in the Global South even as the models trained on them are owned and patented in the Global North. The Nagoya Protocol’s access-and benefit-sharing regime already supplies the relevant architecture for ecological bioprospecting, and its equitable logic must now be extended to human genomic data. Low- and middle-income countries and source communities should be recognized as sovereign rights-holders over the genetic and human-derived inputs that AI longevity models cannot function without — rights-holders at the point of extraction, not supplicants at the point of distribution. ⁹ International human rights law already recognizes the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress; ¹⁰ the innovation is to make that right operational, and to fix consent and benefit-sharing at the input stage, before intellectual property rights harden around the field.

Truby and Kantiana analogize future longevity technologies to vaccines when discussing equitable allocation. That analogy is useful but insufficient. Vaccines are population-level tools deployed against communicable threats; many longevity interventions will be chronic, individualized, expensive, data-intensive, and only partly preventive. A better analogy may be the public utility. Longevity infrastructure — interoperable health data, AI models, validated biomarkers, primary-prevention systems, environmental protections, and geriatric-care capacity — should be governed less like a luxury pharmaceutical market and more like electricity, clean water, or broadband: a foundational system whose benefits must be broadly available before premium tiers are tolerated.

This leads to a more unorthodox proposal: a longevity dividend. Any company that commercializes an AI-enabled longevity intervention using public research, publicly subsidized clinical systems, or population-scale health data should contribute to a pooled fund dedicated to reducing baseline disparities in life expectancy and health span. The fund could support hypertension control, cancer screening, fall prevention, vaccination, dementia care, home modifications, caregiver support, food security, and environmental remediation in communities with shortened healthy life expectancy. In effect, no one should be allowed to sell extra decades to the affluent without helping return stolen years to those denied a fair life course.

The authors’ discussion of intergenerational equity is also important, but it risks reproducing a familiar scarcity narrative in which longer-lived older adults burden younger generations. That concern is real for pensions, labor markets, caregiving, and climate policy. But framing older persons primarily as consumers of resources can reinforce ageism, which the World Health Organization identifies as a pervasive determinant of health. ¹¹ A time justice approach would instead ask how institutions can make added healthy years socially generative rather than extractive. The problem is not that people live too long; it is that our institutions allocate education to youth, work to midlife, care to women, disability to private families, and leisure to retirement as though the twentieth-century life course were biologically ordained.

AI longevity should therefore trigger a redesign of life course institutions. Retirement law should move from a cliff model to a portfolio model: phased work, retraining, caregiving credits, sabbaticals, vigorous enforcement of age-discrimination protections, and portable benefits across a longer life. Health systems should integrate geroscience with primary care rather than build boutique longevity clinics outside ordinary medicine. Universities and professional schools should treat education as recurrent infrastructure, not a front-loaded credentialing event. Caregiving should be recognized as social production through wage credits, pension credits, and respite entitlements. These reforms are less glamorous than epigenetic reprogramming, but they may do more to convert longer lives into freer lives.

The environmental dimension deserves sharper treatment as well. Truby and Kantiana correctly note that longer lives and AI systems carry sustainability implications. But the legal response should not be to balance longevity against climate as though human lives and planetary limits were rival goods. Rather, sustainable longevity should become a condition of legitimacy. AI models used in health and longevity should be subject to environmental-impact reporting; high-energy computational approaches should have to justify their marginal health value; device manufacturers should bear cradle-to-grave obligations for wearables, sensors, and diagnostic hardware; and health systems should resist turning prevention into permanent surveillance consumption. A right to longevity that ignores ecological degradation would be self-defeating, because it would extend life into a world less capable of sustaining health.

The most delicate issue is whether international law should eventually recognize a freestanding right to longevity. I would resist that formulation. A right to longevity is too easily captured by affluent plaintiffs, charismatic technologies, and courts asked to constitutionalize access to interventions of marginal benefit.Reference Olshansky ¹² It could also intensify medical overuse, divert resources from public health, and empower commercial actors to recast normal human vulnerability as a rights violation. The better legal formulation is a right to equitable healthy time. Such a right would not guarantee maximal lifespan. It would require states and powerful private actors to reduce unjust, avoidable, and socially patterned losses of healthy life, while ensuring that scientifically validated longevity benefits are not monopolized by privileged groups. ¹³

This distinction matters. A right to longevity asks, “Can I obtain the technology that may extend my life?” A right to equitable healthy time asks, “Why are some groups systematically denied the conditions and innovations that allow them to live a full life?” The first invites litigation over access to interventions. The second demands governance of housing, labor, pollution, food systems, healthcare, data, intellectual property, age discrimination, and public budgets. For the health law and policy community, the second question is broader, more administrable, and more morally serious.

Truby and Kantiana’s article should be read as an opening move in a field that has not yet decided whether it is about immortality, healthy aging, antidiscrimination, scientific justice, or global political economy. Its provocation is valuable precisely because it forces lawyers to confront an uncomfortable possibility: if death at eighty becomes increasingly preventable for some, then the legal meaning of “premature death” will change for all. But law should not respond by promising everyone a technological escape from aging. It should respond by preventing AI from deepening the unequal distribution of time.

The future of longevity law should therefore begin with four commitments. First, regulate biological age prediction before it becomes an instrument of exclusion. Second, attach equity and public-return obligations — including input-stage sovereignty for the populations whose data and biology make longevity science possible — to publicly enabled longevity innovation. Third, redesign life course institutions so that longer lives expand freedom rather than intensify hierarchy. Fourth, define the legal objective not as maximum lifespan, but as the fair distribution of healthy, capable, and socially supported time. The central legal question is not whether humans have a right to live to 120. It is whether societies have the courage to stop wasting the years that people already have.