An autonomous compute storage device system includes a computing device and a storage device that is coupled to the computing device. The storage device receives a read instruction from a host processing system in the computing device that identifies data stored in a storage subsystem included in the storage device and, in response, performs a read operation to copy the data from the storage subsystem to a memory subsystem accessible to the storage device and provide the data to the host processing system. If the storage device determines that an autonomous compute signature matches the data that was copied to the memory subsystem during the performance of the read operation, it executes an autonomous compute application to perform compute operations that are associated with the data that was copied to the memory subsystem during the performance of the read operation and generate compute operation result(s).