AI Glossary

Autonomy

How much an AI system does without a person approving each step. It comes in degrees, from suggesting an action to taking it and reporting afterward.

In the Machine: Every seat's runs, completions, failures and discards, published.

See also

  • Human in the loop

    A setup in which a person reviews, corrects or approves an AI system's work at chosen points, during its training or before its output takes effect.

  • Kill switch

    One committed file that stops every autonomous seat before it spends anything, because each seat checks for the file before it reads its credential.

  • Autonomy Ledger

    A public JSON record of run, completion, failure and discard totals for each agent seat, aggregated from the org's committed run rows and measured against a baseline frozen at first publication.

Source: Anthropic, Building effective agents (2024) (opens in a new tab)

Cite this term.

CC BY 4.0, attribution required.

This term

Orbyt Labs, Autonomy (AI Glossary), Oct 18, 2026. https://www.orbytlabs.ai/orbyt-collective/glossary/autonomy

The dataset (JSON)

Orbyt Labs Glossaries (Oct 19, 2026), https://www.orbytlabs.ai/glossary#dataset

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