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Received — 14 December 2025 ⏭ Favourites

Stakeholder Criteria for Trust in Artificial Intelligence–Based Computer Perception Tools in Health Care: Qualitative Interview Study

✇Journal of Medical Internet Research
By: Ansh Rai · Meghan E Hurley · John Herrington · Eric A Storch · Casey J Zampella · Julia Parrish-Morris · Anika Sonig · Gabriel Lázaro-Muñoz · Kristin Kostick-Quenet
13 December 2025 at 03:30
Background: Computer perception (CP) technologies hold significant promise for advancing precision mental health care systems, given their ability to leverage algorithmic analysis of continuous, passive sensing data from wearables and smartphones (eg, behavioral activity, geolocation, vocal features, and ambient environmental data) to infer clinically meaningful behavioral and physiological states. However, successful implementation critically depends on cultivating well-founded stakeholder trust. Objective: This study aims to investigate, across adolescents, caregivers, clinicians, and developers, the contingencies under which CP technologies are deemed trustworthy in health care. Methods: We conducted 80 semistructured interviews with a purposive sample of adolescents (n=20) diagnosed with autism, Tourette syndrome, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and their caregivers (n=20); practicing clinicians across psychiatry, psychology, and pediatrics (n=20); and CP system developers (n=20). Interview transcripts were coded by 2 independent coders and analyzed using multistage, inductive thematic content analysis to identify prominent themes. Results: Across stakeholder groups, 5 core criteria emerged as prerequisites for trust in CP outputs: (1) epistemic alignment—consistency between system outputs, personal experience, and existing diagnostic frameworks; (2) demonstrable rigor—training on representative data and validation in real-world contexts; (3) explainability—transparent communication of input variables, thresholds, and decision logic; (4) sensitivity to complexity—the capacity to accommodate heterogeneity and comorbidity in symptom expression; and (5) a nonsubstitutive role—technologies must augment, rather than supplant, clinical judgment. A novel and cautionary finding was that epistemic alignment—whether outputs affirmed participants’ preexisting beliefs, diagnostic expectations, or internal states—was a dominant factor in determining whether the tool was perceived as trustworthy. Participants also expressed relational trust, placing confidence in CP systems based on endorsements from respected peers, academic institutions, or regulatory agencies. However, both trust strategies raise significant concerns: confirmation bias may lead users to overvalue outputs that align with their assumptions, while surrogate trust may be misapplied in the absence of robust performance validation. Conclusions: This study advances empirical understanding of how trust is formed and calibrated around artificial intelligence–based CP technologies. While trust is commonly framed as a function of technical performance, our findings show that it is deeply shaped by cognitive heuristics, social relationships, and alignment with entrenched epistemologies. These dynamics can facilitate intuitive verification but may also constrain the transformative potential of CP systems by reinforcing existing beliefs. To address this, we recommend a dual strategy: (1) embedding CP tools within institutional frameworks that uphold rigorous validation, ethical oversight, and transparent design; and (2) providing clinicians with training and interface designs that support critical appraisal and minimize susceptibility to cognitive bias. Recalibrating trust to reflect actual system capacities—rather than familiarity or endorsement—is essential for ethically sound and clinically meaningful integration of CP technologies.

Exploring the role of lipid metabolism genes in gastric cancer prognosis and tumor immune microenvironment

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Lung OR gastric OR Hepatocellular)
By: Yanan Xiao · Qin Yu · Zewen Zhu · Shan Zhou · Zhe Wu · Xin Luo · Xingzhi Huang · Zhiqiang Zhan
11 December 2025 at 19:00

J Int Med Res. 2025 Dec;53(12):3000605251403252. doi: 10.1177/03000605251403252. Epub 2025 Dec 11.

ABSTRACT

BackgroundGastric cancer remains a major global health challenge due to its high mortality rate and complex pathophysiological mechanisms. Emerging evidence highlights that dysregulated lipid metabolism contributes to gastric cancer progression and prognosis, but the associations between lipid metabolism-associated genes, gastric cancer patient survival, and tumor immune microenvironment remodeling are not fully elucidated.MethodsWe analyzed publicly available omics and clinical data, including RNA sequencing data from 371 gastric cancer samples in The Cancer Genome Atlas database and 433 gastric cancer samples in the Gene Expression Omnibus database. We first curated the top 100 lipid metabolism-associated genes based on relevance scores. Then, univariate Cox regression was used to identify genes significantly associated with overall survival. Consensus clustering was applied to these survival-related genes to define gastric cancer molecular subtypes. Copy number variation analysis was performed to assess genomic alterations of these genes in tumor samples. A prognostic risk model was constructed using least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression and validated via multivariate Cox regression. Immune infiltration analysis using CIBERSORT and ESTIMATE algorithms was conducted to explore associations between lipid metabolism-associated genes and tumor immune microenvironment characteristics.ResultsA total of 3911 differentially expressed genes were identified between gastric cancer and adjacent normal tissues. Among the top 100 lipid metabolism-associated genes, 43 were significantly linked to patient survival, most of which were considered as poor prognostic factors. Copy number variation analysis revealed frequent copy number gains of these genes in tumor samples. Consensus clustering stratified patients into two molecular subtypes (LMAGcluster A and LMAGcluster B), with LMAGcluster A showing significantly worse survival outcomes (median survival: 2.6 years vs. 8.3 years in LMAGcluster B, p < 0.001). LMAGcluster A was also characterized by elevated infiltration of pro-tumor immune cells, such as regulatory T cells and follicular helper T cells. The prognostic model based on 14 key lipid metabolism-associated genes exhibited robust predictive performance, with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve values of 0.702-0.761 in The Cancer Genome Atlas cohort and 0.621-0.638 in the Gene Expression Omnibus cohort for 1-, 3-, and 5-year survival.ConclusionLipid metabolism-associated genes are closely associated with gastric cancer prognosis and tumor immune microenvironment remodeling. The identified gene-based molecular subtypes and prognostic model provide novel insights into gastric cancer progression, and the 14 key genes may serve as potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets.

PMID:41381057 | DOI:10.1177/03000605251403252

Trump’s AI executive order promises ‘one rulebook’ — startups may get legal limbo instead

✇TechCrunch
By: Rebecca Bellan
13 December 2025 at 01:07
Trump signed an AI executive order targeting state laws and promising one national rulebook. Critics warn it could trigger court battles and prolong uncertainty for startups while Congress debates federal rules.
Received — 12 December 2025 ⏭ Favourites

Minimal Residual Disease Detection: Bridging Molecular and Clinical Strategies for Recurrence Prevention in Gynecologic Cancers

✇MRD
By: Andi Darma Putra · Naufal Syafiq Darmawan · Aldi Tamara Rahman · Lasmini Syariatin
11 December 2025 at 19:00

Int J Mol Sci. 2025 Dec 3;26(23):11708. doi: 10.3390/ijms262311708.

ABSTRACT

Gynecologic cancers remain a major global health burden, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, with high incidence and mortality rates around 45-50%. The detection of minimal residual disease (MRD) is transforming the management of recurrence risk in gynecologic cancers through highly sensitive molecular technologies. MRD encompasses small populations of residual cancer cells or post-treatment molecular traces but remain undetectable by conventional methods. Its detection relies on circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), circulating tumor cells (CTCs), and advanced next-generation sequencing (NGS), with ctDNA-based MRD assays having sensitivity levels between 85% and over 99%. Other technologies, such as liquid biopsies and digital PCR, are also in development. MRD status has demonstrated high predictors of recurrence and survival with positive MRD strongly associated with poor outcomes and negative MRD indicates sustained remission. However, MRD detection faces significant limitations, such as tumor heterogeneity, inconstant ctDNA levels, technical issues of false-negative results, and limited clinical accessibility. Therefore, this review presents current evidence regarding the molecular detection of MRD in gynecologic malignancies and assesses its prognostic and predictive relevance. Ultimately, MRD continuous integration into clinical practice offers a promising modality to enable early relapse detection, more precise therapeutic decision-making, and the improvement of personalized medicine access to gynecologic cancers worldwide.

PMID:41373852 | PMC:PMC12692091 | DOI:10.3390/ijms262311708

Mind the Gap! Pathways Towards Unifying AI Safety and Ethics Research

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Dani Roytburg · Beck Miller
12 December 2025 at 13:00
arXiv:2512.10058v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While much research in artificial intelligence (AI) has focused on scaling capabilities, the accelerating pace of development makes countervailing work on producing harmless, "aligned" systems increasingly urgent. Yet research on alignment has diverged along two largely parallel tracks: safety--centered on scaled intelligence, deceptive or scheming behaviors, and existential risk--and ethics--focused on present harms, the reproduction of social bias, and flaws in production pipelines. Although both communities warn of insufficient investment in alignment, they disagree on what alignment means or ought to mean. As a result, their efforts have evolved in relative isolation, shaped by distinct methodologies, institutional homes, and disciplinary genealogies. We present a large-scale, quantitative study showing the structural split between AI safety and AI ethics. Using a bibliometric and co-authorship network analysis of 6,442 papers from twelve major ML and NLP conferences (2020-2025), we find that over 80% of collaborations occur within either the safety or ethics communities, and cross-field connectivity is highly concentrated: roughly 5% of papers account for more than 85% of bridging links. Removing a small number of these brokers sharply increases segregation, indicating that cross-disciplinary exchange depends on a handful of actors rather than broad, distributed collaboration. These results show that the safety-ethics divide is not only conceptual but institutional, with implications for research agendas, policy, and venues. We argue that integrating technical safety work with normative ethics--via shared benchmarks, cross-institutional venues, and mixed-method methodologies--is essential for building AI systems that are both robust and just.
  • ✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
  • Robust AI Security and Alignment: A Sisyphean Endeavor? Apostol Vassilev
    arXiv:2512.10100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This manuscript establishes information-theoretic limitations for robustness of AI security and alignment by extending G\"odel's incompleteness theorem to AI. Knowing these limitations and preparing for the challenges they bring is critically important for the responsible adoption of the AI technology. Practical approaches to dealing with these challenges are provided as well. Broader implications for cognitive reasoning limitations of AI systems
     
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Robust AI Security and Alignment: A Sisyphean Endeavor?

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Apostol Vassilev
12 December 2025 at 13:00
arXiv:2512.10100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This manuscript establishes information-theoretic limitations for robustness of AI security and alignment by extending G\"odel's incompleteness theorem to AI. Knowing these limitations and preparing for the challenges they bring is critically important for the responsible adoption of the AI technology. Practical approaches to dealing with these challenges are provided as well. Broader implications for cognitive reasoning limitations of AI systems are also proven.

Phythesis: Physics-Guided Evolutionary Scene Synthesis for Energy-Efficient Data Center Design via LLMs

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Minghao LI · Ruihang Wang · Rui Tan · Yonggang Wen
12 December 2025 at 13:00
arXiv:2512.10611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data center (DC) infrastructure serves as the backbone to support the escalating demand for computing capacity. Traditional design methodologies that blend human expertise with specialized simulation tools scale poorly with the increasing system complexity. Recent studies adopt generative artificial intelligence to design plausible human-centric indoor layouts. However, they do not consider the underlying physics, making them unsuitable for the DC design that sets quantifiable operational objectives and strict physical constraints. To bridge the gap, we propose Phythesis, a novel framework that synergizes large language models (LLMs) and physics-guided evolutionary optimization to automate simulation-ready (SimReady) scene synthesis for energy-efficient DC design. Phythesis employs an iterative bi-level optimization architecture, where (i) the LLM-driven optimization level generates physically plausible three-dimensional layouts and self-criticizes them to refine the scene topology, and (ii) the physics-informed optimization level identifies the optimal asset parameters and selects the best asset combination. Experiments on three generation scales show that Phythesis achieves 57.3% generation success rate increase and 11.5% power usage effectiveness (PUE) improvement, compared with the vanilla LLM-based solution.

IoTEdu: Access Control, Detection, and Automatic Incident Response in Academic IoT Networks

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Joner Assolin · Diego Kreutz · Leandro Bertholdo
12 December 2025 at 13:00
arXiv:2512.09934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing presence of IoT devices in academic environments has increased operational complexity and exposed security weaknesses, especially in academic institutions without unified policies for registration, monitoring, and incident response involving IoT. This work presents IoTEdu, an integrated platform that combines access control, incident detection, and automatic blocking of IoT devices. The solution was evaluated in a controlled environment with simulated attacks, achieving an average time of 28.6 seconds between detection and blocking. The results show a reduction in manual intervention, standardization of responses, and unification of the processes of registration, monitoring, and incident response.

MedXAI: A Retrieval-Augmented and Self-Verifying Framework for Knowledge-Guided Medical Image Analysis

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Midhat Urooj · Ayan Banerjee · Farhat Shaikh · Kuntal Thakur · Sandeep Gupta
12 December 2025 at 13:00
arXiv:2512.10098v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate and interpretable image-based diagnosis remains a fundamental challenge in medical AI, particularly un- der domain shifts and rare-class conditions. Deep learning mod- els often struggle with real-world distribution changes, exhibit bias against infrequent pathologies, and lack the transparency required for deployment in safety-critical clinical environments. We introduce MedXAI (An Explainable Framework for Med- ical Imaging Classification), a unified expert knowledge based framework that integrates deep vision models with clinician- derived expert knowledge to improve generalization, reduce rare- class bias, and provide human-understandable explanations by localizing the relevant diagnostic features rather than relying on technical post-hoc methods (e.g., Saliency Maps, LIME). We evaluate MedXAI across heterogeneous modalities on two challenging tasks: (i) Seizure Onset Zone localization from resting-state fMRI, and (ii) Diabetic Retinopathy grading. Ex periments on ten multicenter datasets show consistent gains, including a 3% improvement in cross-domain generalization and a 10% improvmnet in F1 score of rare class, substantially outperforming strong deep learning baselines. Ablations confirm that the symbolic components act as effective clinical priors and regularizers, improving robustness under distribution shift. MedXAI delivers clinically aligned explanations while achieving superior in-domain and cross-domain performance, particularly for rare diseases in multimodal medical AI.

Are ultrasensitive ctDNA assays ready for clinical use in early-stage NSCLC?

✇Cell
By: Sam Khan · Janice J.N. Li · Natasha B. Leighl
11 December 2025 at 08:00
Disease recurrence in early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) remains a persistent clinical challenge, underscoring the need for better prognostic biomarkers. In this preview, we highlight the clinical implications of ultrasensitive ctDNA monitoring in lung cancer risk modeling reported by Black et al. in this issue of Cell.

Macrophage-targeted immunocytokine leverages myeloid, T, and NK cell synergy for cancer immunotherapy

✇Cell
By: Michelle von Locquenghien · Pascale Zwicky · Ken Xie · Diego Adhemar Jaitin · Fadi Sheban · Adam Yalin · Florian Uhlitz · Chamutal Gur · Reut Sharet Eshed · Eyal David · Kfir Mazuz · Caroline Jennings Marin · Ankita Sankar · Devin Mediratta · Roberto Avellino · Assaf Weiner · Ido Amit
19 November 2025 at 08:00
MiTEs are myeloid-targeted immunocytokine prodrugs that block TREM2+ tumor-associated macrophages while activating cytotoxic lymphocytes via TME-specific IL-2 activity, eliciting strong anti-tumor efficacy in preclinical models with minimal systemic toxicity.

D2M: A Decentralized, Privacy-Preserving, Incentive-Compatible Data Marketplace for Collaborative Learning

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Yash Srivastava · Shalin Jain · Sneha Awathare · Nitin Awathare
12 December 2025 at 13:00
arXiv:2512.10372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rising demand for collaborative machine learning and data analytics calls for secure and decentralized data sharing frameworks that balance privacy, trust, and incentives. Existing approaches, including federated learning (FL) and blockchain-based data markets, fall short: FL often depends on trusted aggregators and lacks Byzantine robustness, while blockchain frameworks struggle with computation-intensive training and incentive integration. We present \prot, a decentralized data marketplace that unifies federated learning, blockchain arbitration, and economic incentives into a single framework for privacy-preserving data sharing. \prot\ enables data buyers to submit bid-based requests via blockchain smart contracts, which manage auctions, escrow, and dispute resolution. Computationally intensive training is delegated to \cone\ (\uline{Co}mpute \uline{N}etwork for \uline{E}xecution), an off-chain distributed execution layer. To safeguard against adversarial behavior, \prot\ integrates a modified YODA protocol with exponentially growing execution sets for resilient consensus, and introduces Corrected OSMD to mitigate malicious or low-quality contributions from sellers. All protocols are incentive-compatible, and our game-theoretic analysis establishes honesty as the dominant strategy. We implement \prot\ on Ethereum and evaluate it over benchmark datasets -- MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 -- under varying adversarial settings. \prot\ achieves up to 99\% accuracy on MNIST and 90\% on Fashion-MNIST, with less than 3\% degradation up to 30\% Byzantine nodes, and 56\% accuracy on CIFAR-10 despite its complexity. Our results show that \prot\ ensures privacy, maintains robustness under adversarial conditions, and scales efficiently with the number of participants, making it a practical foundation for real-world decentralized data sharing.

Pancreatic Cancer Organoids: Modeling Disease and Guiding Therapy

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Pancreatic)
By: Franck Morceau · Victoria El-Khoury · Kyeong Lee · Marc Jean Berna · Yong-Jun Kwon
11 December 2025 at 19:00

Cancers (Basel). 2025 Nov 30;17(23):3850. doi: 10.3390/cancers17233850.

ABSTRACT

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most lethal malignancies. An unmet need exists for reliable biomarkers and in vitro models capable of predicting patient drug response to advance personalized medicine. Traditional models fail to represent the tumor's complexity and the role of the stromal environment in chemoresistance. Patient-derived organoids (PDOs) overcome these limitations, enabling multi-omics profiling and reliable drug testing for functional precision medicine. This review provides a comprehensive overview of PDAC PDO research, emphasizing the following major areas: (i) the genetic and phenotypic fidelity of PDOs, (ii) their predictive value for drug response and chemoresistance, (iii) the integration of the extracellular matrix and tumor microenvironment (TME) components, and (iv) emerging technologies. Studies confirm that PDOs faithfully represent the primary tumor's specific genetic features and retain intratumoral heterogeneity. PDO-based platforms have demonstrated a strong correlation between in vitro drug sensitivity and in vivo efficacy in xenograft models, validating their utility for identifying drug candidates, repurposing existing drugs, and determining effective combinations. Efforts are ongoing to integrate crucial TME components, like cancer-associated fibroblasts, using innovative co-culture platforms such as fused PDOs and InterOMaX, to better model desmoplasia and chemoresistance mechanisms. Furthermore, PDO technology is converging with microphysiological systems and artificial intelligence tools to facilitate high-throughput drug screening and dynamic, real-time monitoring of therapeutic effects. The integration of PDOs into biobanks and advanced screening platforms holds the potential to accelerate drug discovery and improve therapeutic outcomes for PDAC patients, if challenges related to protocol standardization and regulatory acceptance are addressed.

PMID:41375051 | PMC:PMC12690986 | DOI:10.3390/cancers17233850

Hierarchical Dataset Selection for High-Quality Data Sharing

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Xiaona Zhou · Yingyan Zeng · Ran Jin · Ismini Lourentzou
12 December 2025 at 13:00
arXiv:2512.10952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The success of modern machine learning hinges on access to high-quality training data. In many real-world scenarios, such as acquiring data from public repositories or sharing across institutions, data is naturally organized into discrete datasets that vary in relevance, quality, and utility. Selecting which repositories or institutions to search for useful datasets, and which datasets to incorporate into model training are therefore critical decisions, yet most existing methods select individual samples and treat all data as equally relevant, ignoring differences between datasets and their sources. In this work, we formalize the task of dataset selection: selecting entire datasets from a large, heterogeneous pool to improve downstream performance under resource constraints. We propose Dataset Selection via Hierarchies (DaSH), a dataset selection method that models utility at both dataset and group (e.g., collections, institutions) levels, enabling efficient generalization from limited observations. Across two public benchmarks (Digit-Five and DomainNet), DaSH outperforms state-of-the-art data selection baselines by up to 26.2% in accuracy, while requiring significantly fewer exploration steps. Ablations show DaSH is robust to low-resource settings and lack of relevant datasets, making it suitable for scalable and adaptive dataset selection in practical multi-source learning workflows.

Integrative network pharmacology, transcriptomics, and microbiomics elucidate the therapeutic mechanism of <em>Polygala tenuifolia</em> Willd water extract in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

✇Omics In Lung
By: Yiming An · Xiao Yu · Chao Wang · Xin Yu · Jingtong Zheng · Hongqiang Lin
11 December 2025 at 19:00

Front Microbiol. 2025 Nov 25;16:1703853. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1703853. eCollection 2025.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Polygala tenuifolia Willd (PT) is a plant with both medicinal and edible values. Traditionally, it has been used for sedation, enhancing cognition, resolving phlegm, and relieving cough. However, its protective effects and mechanisms against chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) remain unclear.

AIM OF THE STUDY: This study aims to observe the protective effects of the water extract of Polygala tenuifolia Willd (WEPT) on COPD, and to preliminarily elucidate its potential therapeutic mechanisms by integrating network pharmacology, molecular docking, multi-omics analysis, and molecular experiments.

METHODS AND MATERIALS: HPLC quantified WEPT constituents. COPD mice models established via chronic smoke exposure underwent WEPT treatment, and the therapeutic effect was evaluated by lung function test, histopathology and cytokine profiling. Integrated multi-omics analyses (network pharmacology, transcriptomics, microbiomics) identified bioactive compounds, therapeutic targets, pathway regulations, and microbiota dynamics. Molecular docking validated compound-target interactions, while immunohistochemical/fluorescence assays confirmed key protein expression in lung tissues.

RESULTS: WEPT administration effectively reduced inflammatory cytokine levels in COPD mice, improved lung function, and alleviated histopathological damage like alveolar structural injury and airway inflammation. Network pharmacology and transcriptomic analyses identified Norhyoscyamine and Onjixanthone I as key active components, targeting PIK3CA and AKT1 via PI3K-AKT pathway regulation. Microbiome analysis showed WEPT restored gut microbiota balance. Molecular docking confirmed strong binding of bioactive compounds to core targets, while immunostaining assays demonstrated WEPT suppressed p-PI3K and p-AKT protein expression.

CONCLUSION: WEPT may exert its intervention effects on COPD through a multi-target and multi-level comprehensive regulatory mechanism.

PMID:41377050 | PMC:PMC12685879 | DOI:10.3389/fmicb.2025.1703853

AI-driven virtual cell models in preclinical research: technical pathways, validation mechanisms, and clinical translation potential

✇npj Digital Medicine
By: Chunyu Ma · Han Zhang · Yiwei Rao · Xinyu Jiang · Boheng Liu · Zhikang Sun · Zhenyu Song · Yuan Gao · Yuhao Cui · Xinyu Liu · Zedong Li
11 December 2025 at 08:00

npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 11 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41746-025-02198-6

AI-driven virtual cell models in preclinical research: technical pathways, validation mechanisms, and clinical translation potential
Received — 11 December 2025 ⏭ Favourites

Can AI autonomously build, operate, and use the entire data stack?

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Arvind Agarwal · Lisa Amini · Sameep Mehta · Horst Samulowitz · Kavitha Srinivas
10 December 2025 at 13:00
arXiv:2512.07926v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise data management is a monumental task. It spans data architecture and systems, integration, quality, governance, and continuous improvement. While AI assistants can help specific persona, such as data engineers and stewards, to navigate and configure the data stack, they fall far short of full automation. However, as AI becomes increasingly capable of tackling tasks that have previously resisted automation due to inherent complexities, we believe there is an imminent opportunity to target fully autonomous data estates. Currently, AI is used in different parts of the data stack, but in this paper, we argue for a paradigm shift from the use of AI in independent data component operations towards a more holistic and autonomous handling of the entire data lifecycle. Towards that end, we explore how each stage of the modern data stack can be autonomously managed by intelligent agents to build self-sufficient systems that can be used not only by human end-users, but also by AI itself. We begin by describing the mounting forces and opportunities that demand this paradigm shift, examine how agents can streamline the data lifecycle, and highlight open questions and areas where additional research is needed. We hope this work will inspire lively debate, stimulate further research, motivate collaborative approaches, and facilitate a more autonomous future for data systems.
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