AI Must not be Fully Autonomous

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Tosin P. Adewumi, Lama Alkhaled, Florent Imbert, Hui Han, Nudrat Habib, Karl Löwenmark

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 27 Feb 2026CoRR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) has many benefits. It also has many risks. In this work, we identify the 3 levels of autonomous AI. We are of the position that AI must not be fully autonomous because of the many risks, especially as artificial superintelligence (ASI) is speculated to be just decades away. Fully autonomous AI, which can develop its own objectives, is at level 3 and without responsible human oversight. However, responsible human oversight is crucial for mitigating the risks. To ague for our position, we discuss theories of autonomy, AI and agents. Then, we offer 12 distinct arguments and 6 counterarguments with rebuttals to the counterarguments. We also present 15 pieces of recent evidence of AI misaligned values and other risks in the appendix.