Free will is usually discussed as if it is only a question of freedom from external control. That is part of it, but not the whole thing. I explored this in an earlier post, which I wrote as part of my OMSCS coursework

To have free will, a being must be able to act according to its own intent. It must not only choose, but choose in a way that is meaningfully self-determined. That makes intentionality central. A choice without intent is not really free will.

From a Hindu perspective, this distinction connects naturally to krita and karma: the choice one makes, and the action that follows from that choice. A human being is not merely pushed around by material conditions. The human being has the capacity to control desire, evaluate alternatives, and act. Those actions then shape the moral and spiritual path of the person.

That is the view of free will I find most convincing.

AI agents and choice

The harder question is whether an artificially intelligent agent can have free will.

For narrow AI, my answer is no.

A narrow AI agent can select from alternatives. It can optimize against a goal. It can make plans, call tools, respond to feedback, and produce behavior that looks increasingly independent. But that is not the same as self-determined intent.

The agent’s world is bounded by its training, context window, tools, reward structure, prompts, and permissions. It can operate within that constructed space, but it does not possess the full authorship of its own aims. It does not decide what kind of being it wants to become. It does not carry moral responsibility for its actions in the way a human being does.

We must not confuse fluent behavior with inner agency.

An AI system can say “I decided” without deciding in the human sense, or “I want” and “I believe” without desire or belief behind the words. These are useful linguistic shortcuts, but they should not mislead us into treating the system as a self-determined moral actor.

Knowledge is not enough

One reason narrow AI lacks free will is that its knowledge is incomplete and externally bounded.

To make a genuinely self-determined choice, one must be able to consider alternatives, understand consequences, and rule out paths not merely because a rule forbids them, but because one has an intentional stance toward them. Narrow AI cannot do that in the full sense. Its available alternatives are created by architecture and context. Its refusals are policy behavior, not moral renunciation.

This is where the earlier discussion of consciousness becomes relevant. If free will requires consciousness, then an AI agent would need more than inference, memory, and pattern completion. It would need perception and non-perception in a deeper sense: the ability to acquire awareness on its own, and to understand absence or non-existence with something stronger than statistical limitation.

Current narrow AI does not meet that bar.

Responsibility stays with humans

The practical conclusion is simple: do not move responsibility from humans to AI agents.

An AI agent may act. It may produce an output, make a recommendation, trigger an automation, or complete a task. But the responsibility for that action belongs to the people and institutions that designed, deployed, constrained, and benefited from the system.

Calling an AI system an “agent” is useful in engineering. It tells us the system can pursue a goal across steps. But agency in the engineering sense is not the same as free will in the moral or spiritual sense, and it helps to keep the two apart.

Humans can have free will because humans can form intent, evaluate action, and bear responsibility for karma. Narrow AI can simulate choice, but it does not own its choices. It is still an instrument operating inside limits set by human beings.

So the question worth asking is not whether AI has free will. It is whether we, the humans building and using it, are willing to exercise ours responsibly.

References

Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 7, Verse 5.

BBC Bitesize, “The nature of human life in Hinduism”.