Inside the Stack: Intuitive's Path to Supervised Autonomy
A layer-by-layer audit of Intuitive's five-stage AI framework: what's shipped, what's roadmap, and what's still lab research.
Perception
Reasoning
Navigation
Action
Supervision
The Five Layers Audited
Why This Report Exists
The Autonomy Claims Report audited four companies' autonomy claims against their FDA filings. The single most interesting finding was Intuitive — the only company using the word “autonomy” in an official framework, framed as a future layer rather than a current feature. This report goes deeper on that one finding, layer by layer.
What's Inside
A status audit of all five layers
The academic research hiding inside “roadmap”
A full layer-by-layer status table
Why the roadmap landed exactly when it did
The Verdict
Two of five layers are real and shipping. One sits in a genuinely ambiguous middle ground, with the company's own language admitting today's tools are a step toward something not yet built.
Two are vision statements with no filing, no date, and no committed product — though one of those two is already being proven out in academic labs under a different name, years before any version of it reaches a commercial da Vinci system.