This paper argues against developing fully autonomous AI agents, citing potential risks to safety, security, privacy, and other values. The authors propose a tiered system for categorizing AI agent autonomy, but the framework lacks objective criteria. They suggest prioritizing human control mechanisms and safety verification in AI agent development.

The authors are employed by Hugging Face, a company that develops and distributes AI models, including LLMs. This could bias their perspective against fully autonomous AI agents, which might be seen as competition for their own products. However, their arguments are aligned with broader ethical concerns about AI safety and control, mitigating this potential conflict.

This paper raises important ethical considerations about the development of fully autonomous AI agents. While the core arguments are valid, the paper relies too heavily on theoretical risks and potential harms, rather than empirical evidence. The proposed categorization of agent levels also lacks clarity. Several potential conflicts of interest were also found.