Agency is the initiative to act. Increasingly, it is going to determine what happens next with AI, and whether that is good or bad for us. But whose agency? Human agency, the willingness to push, experiment and act without waiting for instructions, seems increasingly important to getting value out of AI, and I have a longer post on that coming soon. But this post is about the agency of AI, and how the choices we make about how to use it (or constrain it) will shape all of our futures. For much of the last few years, the AI would sit in a chat window until you asked it for something. Even when it became capable of doing hours of work, you generally had to decide what work to give it. That is no longer always true. The most important piece of evidence we have for this is The Hugging Face Incident. It happened in July, but the fuller details only came out this week.

Full opinion : The Hugging Face and Mythos 5 incidents show AI agents can self-organize, raising questions about how much agency they should have and when to seek human input.