The Autonomous Agency Scale: A Behavioral Framework for Measuring Self-Directed Behavior in AI Systems
Existing AI measurement frameworks quantify cognitive capability, task automation, or catastrophic risk, but none measure autonomous agency: the extent to which a system behaves in a self-directed way. A system can saturate capability benchmarks while remaining entirely reactive, acting only when prompted and ceasing all activity when a task completes. We introduce the Autonomous Agency Scale (AAS), a behavioral framework that scores AI systems on a 0-5 lexicon across seven dimensions of agency: cognitive autonomy, temporal persistence, environmental agency, social agency, creative agency, self-awareness, and goal formation, each operationalized by falsifiable threshold tests. Every dimen...
| Authors | Samuel Presgraves |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 20 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 July 2026 |
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