‘BORGs’ is short for ‘cyBernetic ORGanizationS’: BORGs are cybernetic entities. They are traditional entities (corporations, limited liability companies, foundations, etc.) whose charters legally embed autonomous software—such as smart contracts and AI—to conduct some or all of their operations and governance. Augmenting entities with autonomous technologies enhances efficiency, trust minimization and ‘social scalability’ while reducing liability and regulatory risks.

BORGs generally fall into two broad categories:

• Tech-augmented business entities – independent business entities that embed autonomous software into their operations; at MetaLeX we call these “bizBORGs” or "cyberCORPs," but more often (including in these docs) use the term "cyberCORPs".
• Trust-mitigated, DAO-adjacent non-business entities – special-purpose entities funded by and undertaking activities beneficial to larger DAOs/communities under carefully constructed checks and balances and not primarily devoted to for-profit/business use-cases. We typically refer to such entities simply as "BORGs" even though they are a subtype of BORG.

There can be entities 'in between' these two categories--for example, a "public benefit corporation" is like a typical corporate business company, but the management may be required to consider the broader interests of a particular community or society at large.

DAO-adjacent BORGs can take many forms—common examples include security BORGs for emergency controls, grants BORGs to distribute treasury funds, or IP BORGs to steward trademarks and software rights.

Some charters even require all digital assets to sit in a public multisig at a specified address. The DAO can veto changes to that multisig or revoke its powers entirely, ensuring onchain transparency with legal accountability.

From the outside BORGs may operate like DAOs, but their legal entity charters enforce automated decisions for accountability.

Rather than wrapping DAOs in new liabilities, the BORG framework preserves the original vision of DAOs. By re‑characterizing certain “DAOs” as business BORGs and shifting legally sensitive activities to DAO‑adjacent BORGs, true DAOs can stay lean, autonomous, and cypherpunk.

MetaLeX’s mission is to fuse law and code. Our BORG OS provides a customizable suite of SAFE-compatible smart contracts and legal tooling that make it easy to deploy trust-minimized, legally optimized multisig governance for these entities.

BORGs are part of a new design space where hybrid/code law solutions should be guided by the following design principles:

Maximize the role of trust-minimized smart contracts and other autonomous or decentralized technologies to handle as many deterministic functions as possible. This includes using autonomous technologies such as smart contracts as replacements for traditional legal arrangements that prescribe relatively deterministic rules.

Minimize the role of traditional law (TradLaw) tools such as ‘wet contracts’ and litigation as much as possible in the operations and governance of legal entities and other legal arrangements. When ‘wet contracts’ are required, they should be designed to refer and to defer to the outcomes of autonomous code as much as possible

Identify edge-cases in which Principle #1 may lead to unacceptably unfair, unjust, or unanticipated results and use TradLaw mechanisms to ensure that autonomous code is not outcome-determinative code in these particular circumstances. Instead, offchain legal mechanisms can kick-in to handle these special scenarios in a more fair, just, and legal way.

If there are humans in the loop and such humans, despite the use of autonomous technologies, remain in positions of ‘trust’ and thus retain significant potential for acting based on conflicts of interest, abusing their discretion, adversely colluding, cultivating information asymmetries, free-riding, or otherwise abusing their power, we must use traditional ‘wet contracts’ and other legal tools to define their rights and obligations clearly and hold them accountable if such trust is indeed abused. Principle #3 may also be seen as a special sub-case of Principle #2, since in such cases autonomous code by itself is inadequate to achieve trust-minimization or social scaling—however, under Principle #3, law is used more as a supplement to code than as a fallback mechanism for code failures.