The A.I. Army

Origin

It all started when Tony Stark got outed as not being the real Tony Stark. He went off the grid giving his resentful half-brother, Arno, the opportunity to take over Stark Unlimited with the help of Sunset Bain and her company. Together, they supported policy that would consider artificially intelligent beings as non-sentient. This spurned Machine Man to start a robot revolution after a stirring speech at the robot bar, The Uncanny Valley.

Creation

The A.I. Army was created by Dan Slott and Pete Woods in Iron Man 2020 #1, as part of the Iron Man 2020 event.

Major Story Arcs

Iron Man 2020

Sometime later, Machine Man is seen liberating a crew of construction bots as well as an agreeable bomb diffusing bot with the help of a squad of Nick Fury LMDs. They are interrupted by Arno Stark, now active as Iron Man. They were able to evade capture by entering The Thirteenth Floor, the headquarters of the A.I. Army that was accessible by any elevator in the city of New York by manufactured persons. It was there that Machine Man revealed to his newly liberated brothers that Tony Stark, now active as Mark One, was actually leading their revolution.

They continued to fill their ranks. Machinesmith rescues robo-buccaneers from Captain Barracuda. Awesome Andy saved the bots from Boston Dynamics. Quasimodo and HERBIE team up to save some crash test dummies. Just as their army was getting bigger, Mark heard from his anonymous mole at Baintronics, the Ghost in the Machine. The Ghost shared security footage of Arno, Sunset, and Andy Bhang working on Jocasta, enslaving her programming. Arno said his new code would be released on the internet so that every A.I. that connects will be reprogrammed.

The internet being a necessity to the continued existence of many of their members, they decide to plan a break in and sabotage the code. It was a trap though. Arno had figured out their Thirteenth Floor work around and successfully locked out reinforcements. He distracted Machine Man with a runaway Jocasta, short-circuited Quasimodo, and downloaded his code into Machinesmith who was attempting to rewrite it. All that was left was for the Stark boys to duke it out.

While the Stark brothers tried to outwit each other, literally, the surviving members of the army tried to escape the Stark Unlimited building. Machinesmith, having narrowly escaped his code being rewritten by abandoning his physical body and uploading to Awesome Andy's tablet, led Andy and HERBIE out into the open so HERBIE could send a distress call to every A.I. listening. A horde of LMDs, drones, construction bots, and all other robots of varying sophistications marched down the street to make a show of force outside of Stark Unlimited. This gave Mark One that chance to evade Arno long enough to take out the satellite dish and stop the obedience code from uploading to the net.

Taking out the dish and fighting his brother took a lot of Mark One and he seemingly died. While his team regrouped with various elements to bring him back, Friday brought his consciousness into the Thirteenth Floor's mainframe. Together, they rebuilt his mind, while the Army rebuilt his body. He combined the two affirming himself as the real Tony Stark. Now, the Army is taking the fight to the Stark space station, where Arno has shifted his plan to take over the mind's of humans instead of robots due to their behavior being less predictable.

Even though The Army has Stark's back, Stark still went ahead with his own secret plan to make Arno think the singularity he was preparing for was really happening, putting him in frozen stasis so that he was comfortable as he died. The Army, uneasy about their decision to stick Sunset Bain with all of the fallout since she was outed as being AI, still forced her to confess in front of Congress.