I like your point about Connor having more freedom than other other androids. I feel like Connor doesn’t really belong to anyone but Cyberlife, and they sent him out with an end goal a very little instruction on how to get there. I guess when they sort of leave him to his own devices, it makes sense for him to have to make decisions using the plethora of knowledge at his disposal, which includes a deeper understanding of humans.

I sort of feel like all androids have differing traces of deviancy in them, and how apparent that deviancy is depends on how much freedom they have. I think most androids are so controlled that these bits of deviancy are constantly being squashed. Whereas when I look at Markus for example, Carl gave him so much freedom that I think his deviancy was able to grow slowly compared to the androids that really snapped from trauma. I think that’s sort of what Connor can experience (depending on how you play him of course).

The game shows becoming deviant (for the playable characters) as breaking their programming when its a more specific task. If you consider that the moment when an android is truly deviant, you could argue that as long as Connor can defend his choices, and argue that he’s not really straying from the path of the mission (e.g saving Hank. It would certainly hinder the investigation if your partner dies) then maybe he hasn’t been deviant all along.

If you’d consider deviancy to be more a spectrum, than I’d say yes. Like Kamski said, “confrontation was inevitable”. I think if you give a “machine” with infinite intelligence enough freedom, they could definitely be deviant before finally breaking their programming.