>The only way we'll get the "right" way of autonomous software development is if there is extensive and careful regulation with very rigorous auditing and process requirements.

From what I've seen that doesn't really make a difference either. Companies will follow the regulation on paper, but not in spirit. That's already happening in other heavily regulated areas of software development. My experience has actually been that heavy regulation makes for worse software, because the company starts spending more time on lawyers and "quality engineers" driving up meaningless metrics than maintainable clean code.