---
title: "Staged autonomy: definition | Chainfore"
url: https://chainfore.com/glossary/staged-autonomy
updated: 2026-10-22
summary: "Granting an agent authority in four stages: offline, shadow, supervised, limited; each expansion requires owner approval and new evidence."
---

Glossary

# Staged autonomy

Granting an agent authority in four stages: offline, shadow, supervised, limited; each expansion requires owner approval and new evidence.

## Example

In the supervised stage the agent requests approval for each bounded write; in limited autonomy it executes explicitly low-risk actions within validated limits.

## Related terms

- 01 Bounded workflow: A business process in which the data an agent may read, the tools it may call and the actions needing approval are defined in code before the agent runs.

- 02 Agent reliability engineering: The practice of bounding, verifying, recovering and measuring AI agents that act inside enterprise systems, so that autonomy is expanded on evidence.