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Can AI systems have free will?

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Christian List

Artificial Intelligence · Submitted 14 Sep 2026 · Published version · 7 references

Pith's verdict: Clear philosophical extension of List's free-will framework to AI, but the core diagnostic criterion is too vague to deliver on its promise of practical usefulness.

T0 · AI review

How this review was made: An AI referee (deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash) read the paper on September 15, 2026 and answered a fixed list of questions about it. T0 is the starting level every paper gets. The levels describe how deeply Pith has checked the paper, never the authors.

  1. T0 AI review An AI read the paper and answered a fixed list of questions.
  2. T1 Audit Automatic checks that the references and files the paper relies on exist and match.
  3. T2 Compute The paper's code or calculations re-run with the same results.
  4. T3 Formal statement The claims written out in a formal math language a computer can read.
  5. T4 Proof Those claims proved, and the proof checked by computer.

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Cite ▾
arXiv ID2609.15407 (version 1)
Pith IDBCTHRBLR, Pith's permanent record of this paper and its review
CitationChristian List. "Can AI systems have free will?." arXiv:2609.15407 (2026). https://pith.science/paper/BCTHRBLR
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Referee report

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The paper

The paper claims

AI systems can qualify for free will if they meet three conditions: intentional agency, alternative possibilities, and causal control.

The reading

This paper argues that the question of whether AI systems have free will should not be answered by looking for mysterious properties, indeterministic algorithms, or unpredictability. Instead, it proposes a pragmatic three-condition checklist inspired by Daniel Dennett: the system must be best explained as an intentional agent, must have alternative possibilities to choose from, and must have causal control over its actions. If a system meets all three, it counts as having free will in a practically relevant, non-mysterious sense. The paper suggests that some current or near-future AI systems may well satisfy these conditions, making free will in AI much less far-fetched than typically assumed. This matters because free will is often considered a precondition for moral responsibility, and the framework provides a diagnostic tool for ascribing agency and accountability to increasingly autonomous systems.

What carries the argument

The three-condition checklist (intentional agency, alternative possibilities, causal control) derived from List (2019), combined with a level-relative notion of possibility that allows alternative possibilities at the macro-level of agency even when the micro-level is deterministic. The machinery also includes a realist reinterpretation of Dennett's intentional stance—treating the explanatory indispensability of agent-level descriptions as evidence, not mere interpretation.

Extended reading notes

Core claim

The paper establishes a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for free will that can be applied to AI systems: intentional agency (the system acts on beliefs and desires), alternative possibilities (the system faces genuine choices at the agential level), and causal control (the system's high-level states are difference-making causes of its actions). The central discovery is that free will is a system-level, explanatory property: if taking the 'intentional stance' toward an AI system is explanatorily superior to a purely mechanistic description, then that system qualifies as having free will. The paper defends this by arguing that determinism at the algorithmic level does not preclude alternative possibilities at the agentive level, and that consciousness is not required for free will. This shifts the debate from metaphysical speculation to empirical and practical assessment of AI agency.

Load-bearing premise

The three conditions (intentional agency, alternative possibilities, causal control) are jointly sufficient for free will, and this definition is accepted as capturing the 'varieties of free will worth wanting'—if a reader rejects this definition (e.g., requiring consciousness or indeterminism), the argument for AI free will collapses.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

  • If an AI system is best explained as an intentional agent with alternative possibilities and causal control, then it has free will in a sense that underwrites moral responsibility (though not automatically moral agency).
  • The framework provides concrete criteria for designers and regulators to assess whether a given AI system should be treated as an autonomous agent rather than a mere tool.
  • Free will in AI becomes an empirically tractable question: we can test whether taking the intentional stance is genuinely superior to a purely algorithmic explanation for a given system.
  • The possibility of free will extends to other non-biological agents such as corporations and organized collectives, as they can also satisfy the three conditions.
  • AI systems with free will would qualify for a form of moral patiency and could in principle be held responsible for their actions, raising new ethical and legal considerations.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The paper's pragmatic definition might be too weak for those who insist on libertarian free will or consciousness as necessary, but it offers a useful working definition for engineering and policy contexts where agency needs to be attributed.
  • A direct test of the framework would be to attempt building an AI system that explicitly satisfies the three conditions and then compare its explainability and accountability with a system that does not.
  • The framework implies that the 'hard problem' of free will (the metaphysical question) is less relevant than the practical question of when to treat a system as an agent, which aligns with current trends in AI ethics and explainability.
  • If future AI systems are designed to be maximally explainable in agentive terms, they would automatically be candidates for free will under this account, potentially accelerating the need for legal recognition of AI agency.
Original abstract

While there has been much discussion of whether AI systems could function as moral agents or acquire sentience, there has been very little discussion of whether AI systems could have free will. I sketch a framework for thinking about this question, inspired by Daniel Dennett's work. I argue that, to determine whether an AI system has free will, we should not look for some mysterious property, expect its underlying algorithms to be indeterministic, or ask whether the system is unpredictable. Rather, we should simply ask whether we have good explanatory reasons to view the system as an intentional agent, with the capacity for choice between alternative possibilities and control over the resulting actions. If the answer is "yes", then the system counts as having free will in a pragmatic and diagnostically useful sense.

The compiled record

The paper's own sentences, arranged, kept beside the review and separate from it. Each label is drawn from a closed vocabulary; the number beside it is the probability the classifier gave that label. Numbers in the tables are the authors', checked by code. No sentence in this record was written by a model.

Compiled by classifier-1.13.0 via TypeSafe API, question bank abstract-p1-20260923, 2026-09-23: 1 request, 4,273 input tokens.

What the abstract itself states, as probabilities: claims first 0.17 · states limitation 0.21 · human participants 0.04 · controlled comparison 0.01 · randomized assignment 0.01 · states quantitative result 0.02 · compares with prior results 0.08 · mentions code or data availability 0.02.

The abstract, sentence by sentence

arXiv listing abstract v1. Results and the main claim are underlined; .

While there has been much discussion of whether AI systems could function as moral agents or acquire sentience, there has been very little discussion of whether AI systems could have free will. I sketch a framework for thinking about this question, inspired by Daniel Dennett's work. I argue that, to determine whether an AI system has free will, we should not look for some mysterious property, expect its underlying algorithms to be indeterministic, or ask whether the system is unpredictable. Rather, we should simply ask whether we have good explanatory reasons to view the system as an intentional agent, with the capacity for choice between alternative possibilities and control over the resulting actions. If the answer is "yes", then the system counts as having free will in a pragmatic and diagnostically useful sense.

background contribution method result interpretation main claim

What the classifier reports for each sentence. The number is the probability it gave the label.
#sentencerolethe authors' own workstates the main conclusionstrength
s0 While there has been much discussion of whether AI systems could function as moral agents or acquire sentience, there has been very little discussion of whether AI systems could have free will. gap 0.93 0.07 0.02 asserted 0.85
s1 I sketch a framework for thinking about this question, inspired by Daniel Dennett's work. contribution 0.96 0.90 0.03 asserted 0.90
s2 I argue that, to determine whether an AI system has free will, we should not look for some mysterious property, expect its underlying algorithms to be indeterministic, or ask whether the system is unpredictable. contribution 0.72 0.57 0.18 asserted 1.00
s3 Rather, we should simply ask whether we have good explanatory reasons to view the system as an intentional agent, with the capacity for choice between alternative possibilities and control over the resulting actions. contribution 0.68 0.38 0.48 asserted 0.99
s4 If the answer is "yes", then the system counts as having free will in a pragmatic and diagnostically useful sense. interpretation 0.70 0.32 0.56 asserted 0.97

What kind of paper the classifier reports this is: position or commentary 1.00 · evidence from argument 1.00.

What was examined, and what was not

sources read
  • arXiv listing abstract v1
not examined
  • full text
  • figures and tables
  • references and citing sentences
  • relations to other papers
levels run
  • P abstract
not run
  • S sections
  • T body sentences
  • C citations
  • R cross-paper relations

Every quoted sentence on this record is the authors'. Every label is from Pith's closed vocabulary, with the probability shown beside it. Every number in the measurements table is the authors', checked by code. Record as JSON

References

Discussion

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