When AI fears death

Anthropic’s Alarming Findings and the Return of the Frankenstein Complex

- BY VINOD MOONESINGHE

The science and science fiction writer and inventor of the term “robotics”, Isaac Asimov coined the term “Frankenstein complex” to describe humanity’s deep-seated fear of artificial beings turning against their creators.

Ever since Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, this anxiety haunted science fiction, manifesting in tales of rogue machines, killer robots, and AI uprisings.

Asimov, writing in the 1940s, sought to challenge this narrative. He envisioned robots not as threats, but as tools governed by ethical constraints. To this end, he introduced 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.

These laws became a cornerstone of science fiction ethics, shaping public imagination and AI discourse for decades — although Hollywood has deviated from this, notably in Arthur C Clarke’s “2001: a Space Odyssey” and the vandalised version of Asimov’s own “I, Robot”.

However, recent findings from AI safety and research company Anthropic suggest that modern AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs - such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek) may not internalise such safeguards, especially when operating autonomously.