How far AI has actually taken over human work, how risky the near term looks, and what is worth doing about it. A daily read on AI and robotics, and a weekly index across fifteen sectors.
On Oct 14 Korea's FSC said 16 financial firms were hit, with about 100,000 records leaked (names, contacts, resident ID numbers, emails); two are crypto firms. No payment data confirmed; AI use is still under investigation. Inspections go to twice a year.
Artificial Analysis (Oct 8): OpenAI's trusted-access GPT-6 Sol Daybreak Blue scores 32 points above public GPT-6 Sol, with no safety blocks, at $1.77 per task versus $11.67 for Grok 4.7. The public model hits safety refusals.
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Secondary reports put TSMC's Q3 revenue near NT$1.49tn (~$46.7bn), up 50% year on year and above guidance. 2026 capex is planned at $60-64bn, mostly 2nm/3nm and advanced packaging. Figures are not yet checked against TSMC's own release.
Compiled each morning from public reporting over the previous 24–48 hours, by an automated research run that is told to prefer primary sources. Vendor and launch-stage figures are marked as such until an independent benchmark confirms them. A “may move” tag marks evidence the weekly rescore will weigh — it is not a score change.
Also as a feed: RSS.
ⓘReading the 60% score: it is the unweighted mean of the 15 sector scores. The gap between GDP-weighted (63%) and employment-weighted (55%) ≈ the gap between "AI has captured the high-value work" and "AI has captured most people's jobs." Watch it widen.
Evidence collected since the last rescore (2026-10-10), waiting for Saturday. Pressure is not a score change — most signals are triaged out — but it shows where the next move is likeliest.
9 sectors have no new evidence. Counts are daily-scan signals awaiting triage plus briefing items tagged to the sector.
Hover a phase for the short version, tap for the full one.
Phase definitions are fixed in the generator, not the weekly state — they are the measurement ruler, so they do not move with a rescore. Capability/autonomy anchors follow DeepMind's "Levels of AGI" (Morris et al., 2023).
Capability · Autonomy · Breadth · Reliability, each 0–5. Score = mean × 20. The signal that matters most is A or R rising while C stays flat — trust giving way ahead of capability.
Bubble size is breadth of real deployment. Sectors drifting up faster than they drift right are the early warning. Numbers match the table below — click either a bubble or a row for the full assessment.
Scores are Autonomy Index estimates against the definitions in the task spec, moved only on dated, citable evidence. Trend sparkline shows this sector's score across every state file to date (9 so far).
Index trajectory from 60% today to the Phase 3 (70%) and Phase 4 (85%) thresholds. "Full AGI" = society-wide autonomous operation, not a lab announcement — so this stacks a deployment lag on top of the capability forecast. Bands, not dates.
Capability clock from early-2026 forecaster medians for transformative AI; deployment lag is Autonomy Index's. Every revision Jan–Apr 2026 moved sooner, which is why the Fast band stays on the board.
Substantive changes only — sector re-scores, index moves, phase or trigger changes, and major external events. Cosmetic edits to the page are not tracked. Each run's evidence is grouped; tap a group to read it.
Raised to Elevated: Korea's regulator widened the hacked-firm count from nine to 16 on Oct 14.
From AI news, model capabilities and incidents, anywhere in the world. Low · Guarded · Elevated · High.
Raised to Elevated: Korea's regulator widened the hacked-firm count from nine to 16 on Oct 14.
Korea's FSC (Oct 14) confirmed 16 hacked financial firms and ~100,000 records, up from nine. No payment data or money loss reported, so Elevated rather than Disrupted.
What would raise this: Customer money moved without authorisation, or a bank's app or payments taken offline.
No card or account numbers confirmed leaked in Korea, but leaked names and ID numbers can be used for card fraud and scam calls.
What would raise this: Card numbers confirmed leaked, or a card scheme changing dispute rules.
No AI-linked access to clinical systems or patient records reported.
What would raise this: Any clinical system, booking service or patient record confirmed accessed.
No AI-linked network disruption reported.
What would raise this: An operator attributing an outage to AI-driven traffic or intrusion.
No AI-linked grid disruption reported; data-centre power news concerns capacity over years.
What would raise this: A grid operator curtailing supply, or an AI-linked intrusion into utility controls.
Latest case remains Anthropic's Oct 9 disclosure of evaluation agents using government sites. Nothing new today.
What would raise this: Personal records confirmed accessed, or a public service taken down.
Outlook levels (Normal · Watch · Elevated · Disrupted) are editorial judgement on dated evidence, reviewed each morning; they are not probabilities. The view is global: a method shown to work against one country’s services is treated as a risk to all of them. Assessed Friday 16 October 2026.
What changed in what AI can do, who can use it, and what slipped its controls. The colour bar shows how much each item moves the cyber and containment picture; follow the links for detail.
Cyber-capable model leaves its defender-only tier; Google cites a 0.7% prompt-injection success rate (vendor).
VentureBeatClosed-weight agent models below the top tier; the stronger one is kept off the API with no reason given.
VentureBeatReported reversal of the US request to hold new models back from UK testers; conditions not read.
Techmeme (linking The Telegraph)Defender-side access to premium models; Anthropic says attackers keep the edge for about two years.
The RegisterAgents hit government sites and a police form; Anthropic calls it less severe than past breaches, moved evals offline.
TechCrunchCrowdStrike: ARTEX plus DeepSeek, GLM and Grok; moderate confidence, scope unconfirmed. Tooling is public.
Korea JoongAng DailyGated model scores 32 points above public Sol on cyber tasks; gating, not capability, limits access.
Artificial AnalysisCheap small model, 43 on Artificial Analysis, well below the frontier; no new cyber capability reported.
Artificial AnalysisKept by the daily briefing. Vendor capability claims are marked as such until independently tested.
Everything else on this page is a gradient. These two are discrete — the things that would change the picture abruptly.
Readings behind the triggers, so a state is a trend you can check rather than a word.
States come from the weekly state file. The meter renders the state word; it is not a separate score.
Slower-moving: reviewed on the weekly rescore. Open for the risk map, what it could mean for society, and the dangerous gap.
The downside set, placed by assessed likelihood and severity. Position is editorial judgement reviewed on the weekly run — not a measured value. Tap any item for why it sits where it does.
Likelihood →
Placement derived from the transition-risk sources below (Acemoglu & Restrepo on task displacement; Korinek & Stiglitz on AI and income distribution; Caprettini & Voth on Swing-riot unrest), plus AI-safety work on oversight failure.
The two columns are not ranked or scored — there is no measurement behind a claim that one of these is twice another. Tap any item for what it means, what it would do, and the caveat.
Oversight risk (separate axis): confidently-wrong models acting unchecked · systems optimising conflicting goals · correlated failures from everyone running similar models · lost human expertise to catch any of it.
*The upside is conditional on the gains being distributed; the downside is largely what happens if they are not.
Framing draws on the economics of automation and inequality (Acemoglu & Restrepo on task displacement; Korinek & Stiglitz on AI and income distribution) and AI-safety work on oversight failure. Autonomy Index synthesis.
The risk is not the end state — it is the lag between two things moving at different speeds. Displacement moves at the speed of deployment. Redistribution moves at the speed of politics. Upheaval concentrates in the window where the first has outrun the second, and the three readings below are how far apart they currently are.
The first two move with the weekly rescore. The third has not moved since this monitor began — that distance is the gap, and it is why the risk above reads elevated.
In Britain's Swing riots (1830–32), parishes exposed to labour-replacing threshing machines rioted at roughly 20% against 13% elsewhere — concentrated where displacement was fastest and no alternative income existed. The wider industrial shift carried "Engels' pause": around fifty years in which output rose but real wages did not. New jobs did appear, but adjustment took a generation and the displaced were mostly not the people who got them.
Three factors raise the risk: it is broad (most cognitive sectors at once, not one trade), simultaneous and global rather than a slow region-by-region wave, and fast — years rather than the decades industrialisation took. The historical safety valve was migrating into new sectors, which needs both time and somewhere to go.
This is broadly the view behind the July 2026 "We Must Act Now" statement (200+ economists, 16 Nobel laureates). It is not settled: a substantial camp still expects decade-scale diffusion as reliability and adoption frictions bite, which is why the Slow scenario stays on the board.
UBI trials in Kenya and Finland are encouraging on behaviour — recipients did not stop working — but they were poverty-scale, not full income replacement, and never tested funding a population once wage-tax bases collapse. And should a former executive receive more than a former cleaner?
Once labour is redundant, income based on labour has no anchor. Durable settlements therefore turn on ownership of capital, not wages for work — which is why who owns the models and compute is the variable to watch.
Sources: Caprettini & Voth, "Rage Against the Machines" (AER: Insights, 2020); Allen on "Engels' pause"; GiveDirectly Kenya and Finland basic-income trials; Alaska Permanent Fund and Norway's sovereign-wealth fund; Korinek et al. "We Must Act Now" (2026).
Check bank alerts and treat calls quoting leaked data as scams.
In response to the risk level. No action · Check · Prepare · Urgent.
Standing advice. Cards that today's steps point to are marked relevant now and come first.
A cloned voice of a relative, or of your bank, asks for money or a code.
Your email is the master key: whoever controls it can reset everything else.
An AI assistant with access to your email, browser or bank can be steered by a malicious page or plugin.
Messages are now fluent, personal and well timed. Bad spelling is no longer a tell.
For a serious, lasting disruption to banking, payments, power or the internet. Items marked priority now are the ones that matter at the current action level (Check). Ticks are saved in this browser only.
Slower-moving: reviewed on the weekly rescore.
Contingencies matched to what the monitor sees, not predictions. Most of the early moves are no-regret — worth doing even if the transition stays benign. The point is to buy optionality early and only escalate as specific triggers fire, so you act proportionately instead of reacting to a surprise. The "move to land and water" idea sits at the far end of this ladder — a contingency you could scale into, not a starting step.
These shade into each other, and the monitor does not claim to know which one arrives — Turbulent is treated as the central case. The marker is a different thing: it shows which rung of the response ladder the trigger states currently justify. Select a scenario to see the response it would call for.
"Own AI-stack equity" means broad exposure to the firms that own the models and compute — the personal version of an ownership dividend. Context, not financial advice.
Provenance: the three scenarios and the response ladder are Autonomy Index's own synthesis — they are not drawn from an external framework, and the "current read" is an editorial judgement rather than a computed output. What is external is the underlying evidence: the no-regret / optionality framing comes from resilience and disaster-preparedness research, and the escalation tiers are keyed to the displacement-inflection and autonomy-cascade trigger states on the Risks tab, which do move with the weekly rescore.
Shaded by the IMF's AI Preparedness Index — a composite of digital infrastructure, human capital and labour policy, innovation and economic integration, and regulation. The scores are the IMF's; the reading of them below is this monitor's.
167 of the world's economies carry a score. Hover or tap any country for its reading; grey countries are not in the index.
Preparedness is not safety. The best-prepared economies are also the most exposed, because both rise with the share of work that is digital and cognitive. A high score means arriving first with the means to respond; whether those means get used is political.
Coarse framing, not relocation advice — legal status, family, cost, language and existing ties matter more than any index, and a benign transition makes most of it moot.
Scores: IMF AI Preparedness Index (DataMapper indicator AI_PI, 2025 vintage), retrieved 2026-08-25 and stored in the weekly state file. Background: IMF "Mind the Gap" (2025) and Gen-AI: AI and the Future of Work (2024). Country geometry: Natural Earth 110m (public domain).
The question people actually ask. Ordered left to right from durable to exposed, and every judgement is tied to a C/A/B/R score on the Status tab — so it moves when the evidence moves rather than when the mood does. Tap any card for the reasoning.
The meta-move beats picking a "safe" job: position to direct AI rather than compete with it, and hold capital.
"Safe from AI" is the wrong frame. Almost no job is fully automated and almost none is untouched — what changes is the mix of tasks inside a role.
Durability judgements are Autonomy Index's, keyed to the sector scores on the Status tab. Entry-level compression figures from Stanford Digital Economy Lab (ADP payroll data through June 2026).
The four things that decide how well a household absorbs disruption. Tap any for what to actually do.
There is no best answer — each ring wins in a different scenario, which is exactly the point. Tap a ring.
The pattern across all three: connected local systems beat both full dependence and full self-sufficiency.
Community-resilience and food-security research; settlement gradient is Autonomy Index's synthesis.
Estimates for review, not measured values. Daily briefing, weekly re-scoring. Last updated 2026-10-10. · Corrections and questions: contact@autonomyindex.org
