> without the ability of taking real-world action

Apparently some of them have been hooked up to systems where they can take actions (of sorts) in the real world. This can in fact be rather dangerous since it means AI dank memes that are already structurally indistinguishable from prompt injections now also have real effects, sometimes without much oversight involved either. But that's an explicit choice made by whoever set their agent up like that, not a sudden "escalation" in autonomy.