This might be a philosophical difference we're approaching here.
My argument is that it is not doing anything with autonomy.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're arguing that, (at least by the way it spawns subagents), the prompts it creates for those subagents are what you count as autonomous.
In my experience with Claude and Claude Code, it won't spawn uncontrolled subagents unless something in the prompt context makes that a suggestion.
In sessions where I've used it without subagents and it performs things it self-describes as "against its instructions by mistake" I can find what caused it to do that in the original context.
In my opinion, at most, it simulates autonomy. Otherwise, its just like every other machine in existence that it does exactly what you tell it do to, not what you intend it to do.