Fully Autonomous AI Agents Should Not be Developed

Iotas
Author

Margaret Mitchell, Avijit Ghosh, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, Giada Pistilli

Published

September 15, 2026

This paper introduces levels of AI agents and a crisp definition of an AI agent:

Computer software systems capable of creating context-specific plans in non-deterministic environments.

Table 1: five levels of AI agents, from simple processor to fully autonomous agent, with descriptions, example code, and who is in control.

Fully Autonomous AI Agents Should Not be Developed

Margaret Mitchell, Avijit Ghosh, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, Giada Pistilli · arXiv · February 4, 2025

Table 1 (cropped from the PDF) · CC BY 4.0