MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 61.02.09
Autonomy risk
Category: Sources of systemic risks from general-purpose AI
Description
"Granting AI models and systems high levels of decision-making autonomy can lead to unintended consequences."
From A Taxonomy of Systemic Risks from General-Purpose AI (Uuk2025), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
Subdomain definition: AI systems that develop, access, or are provided with capabilities that increase their potential to cause mass harm through deception, weapons development and acquisition, persuasion and manipulation, political strategy, cyber-offense, AI development, situational awareness, and self-proliferation. These capabilities may cause mass harm due to malicious human actors, misaligned AI systems, or failure in the AI system.
How other frameworks describe this risk
- Safety Risks from Affordances Provided to LLM-agents
- Agentic LLMs Pose Novel Risks
- Goal-Directedness Incentivizes Undesirable Behaviors
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Cyber offence
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Autonomous replication and adaptation
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Manipulation
- Subagents
- AI Influence