From Language Models to World-Acting Systems: Progress and Limits of Agentic AI across Digital, Social, Virtual, and Physical Environments

The paper reviews how large language models have evolved into agents that can influence external environments through tool use, interface operation, delegation, state retention, virtual world inhabitation, and robotic control. It critiques the narrative of a single march toward autonomy, distinguishing model competence from system integration, persistence, and safe authority. The authors find that action-interface expansion is well documented, while robust completion, recovery, authorization, and independent verification remain less proven, and they propose a framework of justified delegation to guide future research.