I agree that there is no autonomy, as anything it does was determined by its training, which comes from a human source at some point. If we wanted to get really deep, one could argue the same point for humans - the whole "I stood on the shoulder of giants" thing, we all learn by being taught by other humans, or by experiences ourselves that show what works and what doesn't.

I have seen Claude go out and do things not remotely suggested (sometimes it's a good thing, but sometimes it's too much). Now, is there some subtleness in the prompt that spurred that? It must be very hidden, as when Claude says it's doing X, Y, and also saw it could do Z, and I was only looking for X...

But sure, it's a simulation and somewhere along the process of doing X it saw in training data, or rather the training data steered it towards also adding in Y and Z as useful. Not thinking, but it's a gray line sometimes.