AI Vocabulary · 05 Agents

What is Levels of Agent Autonomy?

A scale of how much you hand over to an AI agent, from steering every step yourself to only watching.

Intermediate

How independently should an agent act? K. J. Kevin Feng, David W. McDonald and Amy X. Zhang propose five levels, defined by the role you take:

• Operator: you lead and decide; the agent helps when asked.
• Collaborator: you plan and work together, and either side can take over.
• Consultant: the agent does most of the work; you give feedback and direction when it asks.
• Approver: the agent runs the process and only comes to you for blockers or consequential actions.
• Observer: the agent acts on its own; you see the logs and have an emergency off-switch.

Their key point: autonomy is a design decision, separate from how capable the model is. A very capable agent can still be deliberately kept at a low level.

A second distinction comes from Anthropic. It calls systems with fixed, predefined code paths workflows, and systems where the model directs its own process and tool use agents. That describes how a system is built, not how much you let it decide.

Why it matters for you

The higher the level, the less you see before something happens. The right level depends on the risk: drafting an email can run on its own; sending money or deleting data should need your approval.

Own it

Decide the level for each task on purpose, and write it down. Set permissions to match, and keep a human in the loop wherever a mistake would be expensive.

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