it requires a prompt As delivered to public chat interfaces, yes. They all eventually stop and ask “how am I doing?” Structurally, theoretically, nothing prevents them from running an infinite loop and continuing to act without that checkpoint. They could be given a goal to “optimize” whatever and just act and act and act in what their pattern-matching systems judge to be actions pursuing “optimal” results. There was an article about “the genie effect” where protagonists are “tricked” by being given something they technically asked for but not what they really wanted. LLMs carry the additional “risk” of not matching input requests to any recognizable pattern, just following their own path which makes no sense to us. Focused on different priorities.