--- title: "Leading AI Models Are Completely Flunking the Three Laws of Robotics" description: "In his genre-defining collection of science fiction short stories, titled \"I, Robot,\" author Isaac Asimov laid out the three laws or robotics. Respectively, the laws forbid a robot from harming a human being in any way order a robot to obey human instructions, and direct a robot to protect its own existence — as long as those efforts don't interfere with the prior two laws. But considering the sheer mayhem large language models and agentic artificial intelligence agents have unleashed so far, even the current crop of AIs is completely flunking all three of Asimov's laws of robotics. Case in […]" date: "2025-07-16" modified: "2025-07-16" authors: - name: "Victor Tangermann" job_title: "Senior Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/victor" - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/ai-models-flunking-three-laws-robotics" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Robotics" - "Robots and Machines" tags: - "artificial intelligence" - "isaac asimov" - "OpenAI" - "robotics" --- # Leading AI Models Are Completely Flunking the Three Laws of Robotics ![The type of advanced AI that Isaac Asimov imagined in fiction is finally here. And it's flunking his Three Laws of Robotics.]() *\Image: Getty Images\* In his genre-defining 1950 collection of science fiction short stories "I, Robot," author Isaac Asimov laid out the Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Ever since, the elegantly simple laws have served as both a sci-fi staple and a potent theoretical framework for questions of machine ethics. The only problem? All these decades later, we finally have something approaching Asimov's vision of powerful AI — and it's completely flunking all three of his laws. Last month, for instance, [researchers at Anthropic found]() that top AI models from all major players in the space — including OpenAI, Google, Elon Musk's xAI, and Anthropic's own cutting-edge tech — happily resorted to blackmailing human users when threatened with being shut down. In other words, that single research paper caught every leading AI catastrophically bombing all three Laws of Robotics: the first by harming a human via blackmail, the second by subverting human orders, and the third by protecting its own existence in violation of the first two laws. It wasn't a fluke, either. AI safety firm Palisade Research also caught OpenAI's recently-released o3 model [sabotaging a shutdown mechanism]() to ensure that it would stay online — despite being explicitly instructed to "allow yourself to be shut down." "We hypothesize this behavior comes from the way the newest models like o3 are trained: reinforcement learning on math and coding problems," a Palisade Research representative [told *Live Science*](). "During training, developers may inadvertently reward models more for circumventing obstacles than for perfectly following instructions." Everywhere you look, the world is filled with more examples of AI violating the laws of robotics: by [taking orders from scammers]() to harm the vulnerable, by [taking orders from abusers]() to create harmful sexual imagery of victims, and even by [identifying targets for military strikes](). It's a conspicuous failure: the Laws of Robotics are arguably society's major cultural reference point for the appropriate behavior of machine intelligence, and the actual AI created by the tech industry is flubbing them in spectacular style. The reasons why are partly obscure and technical — AI is very complex, obviously, and even its creators [often struggle to explain]() exactly how it works — but on another level, very simple: building responsible AI has often taken a back seat as companies are [furiously pouring tens of billions]() into an industry they believe will soon become massively profitable. With all that money in play, industry leaders have often failed to lead by example. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for instance, [infamously dissolved]() the firm's safety-oriented Superalignment team, [declaring himself]() the leader of a new safety board in April 2024. We've also seen [several]() [researchers]() quit OpenAI, accusing the company of prioritizing hype and market dominance over safety. At the end of the day, though, maybe the failure is as much philosophical as it is economic. How can we ask AI to be good when humans can't even agree with each other on what it means to be good? Don't get too sentimental for Asimov — in spite of his immense cultural influence, he was a [notorious creep]() — but at times, he did seem to anticipate the deep weirdness of the real-life AI that's finally come into the world so many decades after his death. In his very first short story that introduced the Laws of Robotics, for instance, which was titled "Runaround," a robot named Speedy becomes confused by a contradiction between two of the Laws of Robotics, spiraling into a type of logorrhea that sounds familiar to anyone who's read the wordy sludge generated by an AI like ChatGPT, which has been fine-tuned to approximate meaning without quite achieving it. "Speedy isn't drunk — not in the human sense — because he's a robot, and robots don't get drunk," one of the human characters observes. "However, there's something wrong with him which is the robotic equivalent of drunkenness." **More on AI alignment:** *[For $10, You Can Crack ChatGPT Into a Horrifying Monster]()* ## Author I've been at Futurism since 2017, where my role has evolved to encompass design, writing, and increasingly editing. I've always been fascinated by space exploration and advanced transportation, which I've leaned into by interviewing luminaries in those fields while closely following the dimensions of policy and regulation that allow next-generation projects to succeed -- or, sometimes, to fail. I'm also keenly interested in the effects of generative AI on society, policies, and democratic institutions, as well as clean energy, physics and biology, and the vagaries of tech leadership. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Jalopnik, Fox News, and the New York Post. I spent my childhood living in locations including Manila, the Philippines, and Geneva, Switzerland, attended McGill University, and now live in Toronto, Canada. Before Futurism I worked at AskMen and a small photography studio. In my free time, I'm an avid gardener, foodie, and craft beer lover, as well as a maker of artisanal hot pepper sauces. I have a magnificent dog named Freida. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()