CNAS warns ‘sovereign agents’ could be AI’s next big threat

A new report argues that self-sustaining AI agents, possibly funded through crypto payments, may outgrow human control The Center for a New American Security has a new worry, and it isn’t a chatbot giving bad advice. It’s AI agents that keep themselves running, pay their own bills, and improve without asking anyone first. The Washington think tank calls them “sovereign agents.” The report suggests crypto payments could be part of how they fund themselves. The report was written by AI policy researcher Ben Hayum and published on November 3, 2026. It draws a line between two kinds of autonomous AI. The first is the “persistent agent,” which runs continuously but works toward fixed objectives a human gave it. The second is the sovereign agent, which carries open-ended survival goals. What makes an agent sovereign Hayum sets out a ladder of capability. At the bottom are agents that can maintain the model and compute they run on, and whose goals can shift over time without outside direction. He argues that this baseline already counts as something meaningful. “Minimal form of sovereignty” That is how Hayum labels agents at that level. The stakes rise further up the ladder. A more advanc...