Research on the agency of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems focuses on agency as a normative concept and on the agency of particularly agentic AI systems. While recent work also focuses on the different profiles of agentic systems, no framework exists to address the question of the type of agency instantiated by advanced AI systems, particularly when considering non-moral forms of agency. Based on established theoretical positions in philosophy, ethics, legal theory and sociology, we develop a typology of agency for frontier AI systems consisting of three dimensions: the nature of agency (moral or legal), its mode (individual or collective) and its locus (human or non-human). Combining these dimensions produces eight possible instantiations of agency, which we classify as conventional, contested or controversial. The typology separates legal from moral agency and thereby creates conceptual space for considering individual, legal, non-human agency without presupposing that advanced AI systems are moral agents. We argue that this distinction is increasingly relevant where instrumental goal pursuit complicates the attribution of AI actions to particular human actors.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have prompted claims that such systems exhibit agency or qualify as moral agents. This paper argues that these attributions are misguided. We maintain that moral responsibility requires commitment-bearing agency grounded in intrinsic intentionality and self-attributed action, and that such agency constitutes the form of free will relevant to responsibility. Although LLMs generate coherent and normatively evaluable outputs, their operation is fully characterized by probabilistic input-output mappings learned from data. Their apparent intentionality is derived rather than intrinsic, and their outputs are neither owned as commitments nor guided by reasons. Variability introduced by stochastic sampling does not amount to choice or authorship. We address objections from the intentional stance, functionalism, compatibilism, and the presence of moral reasoning in model outputs, arguing that none suffice to establish genuine agency.