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Autonomy

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In the EU AI Act and OECD texts, some degree of independence of action from human involvement, which almost every AI system has. ISO/IEC 22989 uses the word for a much stronger property, a system that can change its own goal or domain of use, and calls the ordinary case automation 1.

Developed in
ch. 11, ISO/IEC 22989
Chapters
ch. 11, AI Defined · ch. 23, AI Agents
Contrast with
Autonomy level
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

17 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

Patterns that use this term

5 pattern pages use the term, most mentions first.

  • Contributing factor

    A property of a system or its context (autonomy, exposure, reversibility, vulnerable groups, data sensitivity, opacity) that moves the likelihood or severity…

  • Loss of control

    One of the systemic risks the GPAI Code of Practice specifies: risks from humans losing the ability to reliably direct, modify or shut down a model, which may…

  • ISO/IEC 22989

    The ISO/IEC standard (2022) that establishes AI concepts and terminology for use by other standards and by diverse stakeholders.

  • Least agency

    The principle, in the OWASP agentic list, of giving an agent no more autonomy than its task needs: agentic behaviour deployed where it is not needed widens…

  • AI Act (EU)

    Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the EU's horizontal, risk-tiered law for AI, amended by the Digital Omnibus.

  • Kill switch

    A tested mechanism to stop an agent or system from acting; a precondition of granting autonomy, registered against the agent's identity.

  • AI system

    For governance, the object the AI definition brings into scope.

Sources

  1. [1] ISO/IEC 22989:2022, Artificial intelligence concepts and terminology (referenced by identifier only; autonomy and heteronomy; clause 5.11 machine learning approaches: supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, reinforcement). ISO/IEC. 2022-07. https://www.iso.org/standard/74296.html (verified: secondary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Autonomy. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/autonomy. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026autonomy,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Autonomy}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/autonomy}
}