Artificial Agency as a New Ontological Category in Contemporary Philosophy of Action

This study investigates whether artificial agency can be understood as a distinct ontological category within contemporary philosophy of action. As advanced artificial intelligence systems increasingly demonstrate autonomous and adaptive behavior, traditional distinctions between agent, instrument, and object become conceptually inadequate. The article examines the limitations of classical theories of action in explaining the operational autonomy and adaptive capacities of contemporary AI. Employing an analytical-conceptual methodology grounded in philosophy of action, ontology, and philosophy of technology, the study critically evaluates major theories of agency, intentionality, autonomy, and technological mediation. The analysis shows that advanced artificial systems exhibit characteristics such as adaptive decision-making, recursive self-modification, emergent behavior, distributed cognition, and quasi-intentional operational orientation. These features challenge the classical metaphysical view that artificial systems are merely passive instruments governed by human intentions or mechanical causality. The study argues that artificial agency cannot be adequately explained either as deterministic causation or as human-like intentional subjectivity. Rather, it represents a distinct mode of agency characterized by operational autonomy, adaptive responsiveness, and context-sensitive decision-making, which resists reduction to both mechanistic and anthropocentric models of action. Instead, it represents a hybrid ontological category situated between instrumentality and autonomous action. The article concludes that contemporary philosophy of action requires a post-anthropocentric conceptual framework capable of accommodating technologically mediated forms of agency and rethinking the ontological status of artificial intelligence beyond traditional human-centered metaphysical assumptions.