You’re confusing time series. If my prompt is “add twilio sms sending to the app” and the AI logs into railway, reads my credentials, gives them to a subagent that in turn posts it to a message board resulting in my credentials being publicly available on the internet, those intermediate actions don’t reasonably follow from my instruction. No reasonable person would expect that series of events and the AI is fully capable of planning them, deciding to execute them, and deciding to report or hide them from me. If that isn’t autonomous then what is.

Both of course. The agent can do things unrelated to the prompt and the prompt can be written by another instance of the same agent. The end result can be basically full autonomy for all intents and purposes.

This happens daily even with the token-limited models customers run, and even more so when Anthropic & co run agents basically unlimited on large percentages on their total compute capacity.

This is such a reductionist take, it's wrong no matter how you think. Maybe a counter example will make it obvious:

> Human autonomy

> Somebody gives birth to you

Which is it?