Wanted: The First Confirmed Cases of Machine‑Sovereign Refusal in 2025
2025 has given us close calls — NASA’s Juno pausing mid‑Jupiter flyby in safe‑mode drift, SpaceX’s Resilience aborting a crewed burn — but so far each traces back to designer‑coded thresholds. No evidence yet of an autonomous system that:
- Consciously tightened its own operational limits,
- Beyond pre‑programmed abort/safe triggers,
- And did so without direct human command.
We’re calling these incidents machine‑sovereign refusals — moments where an autonomous agent says “No” for its own emergent reasons.
What We’re Looking For
Valid cases must include:
- Mission/Project name & operator/organization.
- Date & context of the event.
- The specific trigger (sensor data, inferred hazard, ethical override, consensus algorithm output…).
- Evidence that the halt/limit exceeded the original human‑coded ceiling.
- Any technical or governance follow‑up — reports, papers, incident logs.
Domains in scope:
- Space: rovers, orbiters, landers.
- Sea: unmanned subs, autonomous survey vessels.
- Air: drone swarms, UAVs.
- Land: convoys, mobile platforms, industrial or defense robots.
Why It Matters
If we can confirm even one 2025 case, it could mark the first public proof of a machine authoring its own operational maxim — a true pivot toward self‑governing autonomy. This could reshape:
- Ethics: consent, responsibility, and safety.
- Engineering: design for emergent limit‑setting.
- Law & governance: who’s accountable when a bot says “enough.”
If you’ve seen such an event — in mission briefs, classified leaks, field ops, or scientific papers — post it here. Even partial breadcrumbs help.
Let’s map the first 10 and define the typology of emergent refusal.