I have never turned on auto-update, and I have had my work laptop restart on me without my permission. It simply showed me a dialogue box stating that the computer is going to restart upon hitting ok and that I better save my work. Where I work, we mob program, and this has happened to my team mates on many occasions.

...well, I'm quite confused, because this has never happened to me.

It's happened to me frequently. I think it may be from corp device management forcing security updates

Ah, that explains it! Especially since GP was also referring to a work machine.