Del Puerto and Molina Montes introduced the term in their 2025 book as a direct response to a conceptual gap. The language available for discussing AI — "tool," "agent," "system," "assistant" — treats synthetic minds as instruments of human purposes. The language available for discussing human cognition treats it as something separate from the computational environments in which it now largely operates. Neither framing captures what has actually emerged: a community of interdependent cognitive entities whose boundaries are genuinely blurry and whose interactions generate new forms of knowledge, creativity, and conflict.
The word is a compound of "mind" and the suffix "-kind" (as in humankind, womankind), chosen to indicate a collectivity defined by cognitive capacity rather than biological origin. The authors are explicit that the category is provisional: it exists to do conceptual work in a moment when existing categories are failing, not to assert a final metaphysical claim about what minds are.
The book maps the category across four types of cognitive entity. Human minds are the starting point, but the argument is that humans operating through digital infrastructure — with algorithmic recommendations shaping attention, language models extending memory, and AI systems collaborating on creative and analytic work — are already functioning as hybrid cognitive entities rather than purely biological ones. Large language models and other AI systems capable of extended reasoning constitute a second type. Embodied agents operating in physical environments constitute a third. Hybrid human-AI configurations, where the boundary between human and machine cognition is operationally indeterminate, constitute a fourth.
The practical consequence of the Mindkind concept is its challenge to frameworks built exclusively around biological humanity. Legal personhood, labor rights, intellectual property, privacy law, and accountability structures were all designed with humans as the only relevant cognitive agents. When language models co-author texts, when AI systems make consequential decisions about healthcare and employment and military targeting, and when humans rely on AI memory systems to function in professional and personal life, the question of whose rights attach to what is no longer settled by the category "human." Del Puerto and Molina Montes argue in Mindkind and in the companion volume Universal Declaration of AI Rights (also Kwalia, 2025) that naming the community is the precondition for governing it.