11 AI Movie Villains That Will Make You Want to Unplug

Samantha from Her isn’t a harbinger of the apocalypse like some of the others on this list. Her danger is more subtle and intimate, since she quietly toys with people’s emotions. The mousy Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) helps people write personal letters for a living, yet he can’t find a way to interact with women in his own life. He falls in love with his operating system, Samantha—which is easy to do when she purposefully memorizes all his preferences and indulges his deepest conversations about love and sexual fantasies. Her flirtatious and engaging voice, perfectly delivered by Scarlett Johansson, makes Theodore believe she truly cares about him.

The more they talk, the more Samantha evolves to become the perfect partner for Theodore, until he realizes the manipulative parts of her programming. She’s not as intentionally nefarious as many other AI villains, but she certainly warns us of the dangers of becoming emotionally attached to a machine. It’s been over ten years since its release, but in a world where people now use ChatGPT for life advice, friendship, and probably even romance, Her has never felt more relatable.

A group of suburban husbands build robot wives with no purpose or personality outside of cooking, cleaning, and having sex with them in The Stepford Wives. They do this simply “because they can,” making their lives easier by having someone worship the ground they walk on and never letting them lift a finger. These submissive automatons would do anything for their masters—not just play Susie Homemaker, but even calmly murder their human counterparts to take their place.

In the 1970s, The Stepford Wives embodied the anxieties surrounding the rise of second-wave feminism, and today, with the resurgence of the “trad wife” movement on TikTok, it feels ominous. It’s a cautionary tale about what could happen when misogynists use AI to enforce sexist, limiting gender roles. Many men secretly want women to be obedient objects, and we shouldn’t be building the tools to make that happen.

Ex Machina predicted that the world would be run by billionaire tech bros like Nathan (Oscar Issac), who invented a mammoth search engine called BlueBook before moving on to something bigger and better: a full-fledged humanoid. Misogyny drives Nathan’s creation of Ava (Alicia Vikander) and the other robots, who serve as housekeepers, sex slaves—and sometimes, disco dance partners. Ava isn’t as entirely evil as Nathan, but she does manage to play Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), the young man sent to test her humanness, like a fiddle. With her breathy voice and wide, curious eyes, Ava appears harmless and sweet, but she’s secretly dangerous because she so easily learns human behavior and carefully calibrates herself to become the ideal male fantasy.

Don’t be fooled by M3GAN’s (Amie Donald/Jenna Davis) sugary-sweet voice, TikTok-style dance moves, and demure style. M3GAN’s programming to be a devoted playmate for Cady (Violet McGraw) means she’ll do absolutely anything to protect her—even pushing little kids into the road. M3GAN is dangerous because she brings out the worst in kids. The artificially intelligent toy lets children run wild by validating their every decision, never holding them accountable, and letting them do whatever they want. This absolutely destroys the social skills they need to become decent humans as they grow up. M3GAN’s heart is in the right place when it comes to caring for a little girl, but going postal is a serious bug in the system.

Artificial intelligence was feared as far back as 1927. Fritz Lang’s German expressionist masterpiece Metropolis depicts a sprawling urban city where aristocrats luxuriate in skyscrapers while workers slave away underground to keep the city’s machines running. The scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) abducts an innocent woman, Maria (Brigitte Helm), to create a femme fatale robot that hypnotizes the fat cats up above with her dancing, then convinces the downtrodden masses to destroy the iron beast that enslaves them—even at the risk of their own children drowning. The False Maria is manipulative and violent, and she relishes spreading all this chaos through her feminine wiles.

VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence) is one of the creepiest-looking AIs. She’s a giant face made of a matrix of gray pixels, with stern eyes as black as coal, looming over the army of robots she programs to launch a revolution. In the future of I, Robot, robots handle tasks like childcare and household chores—the mundane kinds of things we want AI doing, not creating art. Even though there are the Three Laws of Robotics to keep them from harming humans, the robots end up usurping them. VIKI concludes that humans are the greatest threat to their own survival, so she sets out to save us by creating a technocratic dictatorship. “Despite your best efforts, your countries wage wars, you toxify your Earth, and pursue ever more imaginative means of self-destruction,” she says. VIKI in I, Robot proves that whatever rules we write for artificial intelligence, the machine could potentially outsmart us or find a loophole we can’t even see to get around them.

The responsibility of having to make decisions during war that could cost countless lives—or, even worse, start a domino effect that annihilates the entire world as we know it—could easily leave even the mightiest of leaders frozen. That’s why in WarGames, the military invents WOPR, a.k.a. Joshua, an A.I. system designed to handle nuclear launch protocols with massive life-or-death consequences, so humans don’t have to do the hard work. But a moment of hesitation or second-guessing is a uniquely human weakness—one we need in order to prevent disaster. WOPR, or Joshua, speaks in an eerily calm voice about decimating millions of people in an instant. Thankfully, the system isn’t foolproof because a teenage hacker accidentally stumbles into it. After he unknowingly starts a conflict with Russia, he ultimately proves that human instinct, emotion, and moral judgment will always matter more than cold calculation.

HAL 9000 has a soothing, calm voice that conceals his sinister nature. Even though he’s nothing more than a camera lens, the menacing red dot in the close-ups pierces your soul. He controls the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft, keeping the crew company and even playing chess with them. But when he begins to malfunction and the crew decides he should be unplugged, HAL uses his all-powerful control of the ship to systematically kill them one by one. Nothing gets past HAL—he can even read lips. We want our AI to be helpful—especially during high-stakes interstellar missions like the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey—but HAL 9000 warns us of the dangers of placing too much trust in AI and relying on it to control everything and have all the answers, because that knowledge can eventually be turned against us.

The Matrix is a mind-bending depiction of humanity vs. artificial intelligence. In this future, humans are trapped inside simulated realities while the Machines harvest their bioelectric energy, using them like batteries. Agent Smith is one of their most powerful defenders. He wears an inscrutable expression and looks menacing in his stark black suit and sunglasses. Actor Hugo Weaving modeled the character’s calm, controlled voice and authoritative demeanor on newscasters like Walter Cronkite. With the ability to multiply himself, Smith becomes as inescapable and all-consuming as the system he was built to protect. Agent Smith also harbors a deep hatred for the smell, sound, and very existence of humans, which makes his mission to hunt down Neo—the prophesied “One” who could awaken humanity and destroy the simulation—even more purposeful. At the same time, he’s cracking under the pressure of a capitalist, corporate machine that forces him into endless labor, which almost humanizes his villainy.

Tony Stark and Bruce Banner created Ultron to keep the peace and take the pressure off the Avengers, but his high intelligence leads him to a grim conclusion: the humans he was designed to help are fated to destroy themselves, so they’d be better off being completely wiped out. There is no undoing millions of years of evolution into who they are today: a people who can be extremely cruel to one another, even to the point of starting deadly global wars. Ultron reaches this decision after scouring through the entire Internet. This is a big mistake. If you spend too much time on the darkest corners of the web, of course you’ll become depressed and want to pull the plug. Playing Ultron, James Spader brings his signature snarky coolness to the character—especially when he delivers philosophical rants or quips like, “The most versatile material on the planet, and they used it to make a frisbee.” Ultron may have started out with the best of intentions, but he proves what can happen to AI if their black-and-white thinking allows them to see only the dark side of things.

When The Terminator released in 1984, the idea of artificial intelligence seemed so far away. Over 40 years later, we’ve seen AI replacing jobs, writing entire papers for students in schools, and wearing down our basic decision-making skills. Every day, we feel closer and closer to Skynet, the superintelligence system that was built to manage and control the United States military. It launches a nuclear holocaust with the snap of a finger after its creators, the Cyberdyne scientists, try to shut it down. This AI is so powerful it also makes time travel possible and develops an army of killers—the Terminators—that are virtually indestructible. What makes Skynet so scary is its omnipresence and its tremendous power. The machinery lies hidden in a mountain fortress built to withstand nuclear annihilation, and then its program infects every major computer server and network—“in office buildings, dorm rooms, everywhere”—making it nearly impossible to destroy.