I noticed this when I spotted a graveyard just past my borders -- if I was manually controlling my ship, it would not allow me to move it past the maximum range, but if I then told my survey ship to automatically survey, the game would plot a course directly towards the anomaly, and would then grab it despite being out of range. As far as I can tell, this means AI ships also ignore the range limit as long as something they want is within viewing distance.
Naturally, this is a very early beta, so this isn't unexpected.
