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* The [[Trope Namer]] is ''[[The Iron Giant]]''.
* The short story ''[[EPICAC]]'' has the titular machine cause its own destruction (by either fire or explosion) with a "suicide" note reading, "I don't want to be a machine, and I don't want to think about war".
* In ''[[Short Circuit (Film)|Short Circuit]]'' a military combat robot gains sentience, and this trope ensues.
{{quote| [[Memetic Mutation|Number 5 is alive]]. }}
* [[Fred Saberhagen]]'s [[wikipedia:Berserker chr(28)Saberhagenchr(29)|Berserkers]] are [[Killer Robot|programmed to destroy all life]] in the galaxy, but in the short story ''Mr Jester'' one of them [[Identity Amnesia|forgets what "life" is]], and the local trickster tells it that life is a lack of [[Hilarity Ensues|laughter]]...
* One of the example characters in ''[[GURPS]]'' Fourth Edition core book is the military robot turned Buddhist monk precisely for this reason.
* {{spoiler|River Song}} from ''[[Doctor Who]]'' might not have been created as a weapon, but she was taken from her parents as a baby with the sole purpose to, as her captor explicitly states, [[Laser Guided Tykebomb|"become a weapon"]]. Unfortunately for her "creators", while they suceeded to both fashion her into a perfect psychotic assassin ([[Gone Horribly Right|too well, one might say]]) and make her completely obsessed with her target, they failed to eradicate all her human emotions. The former led to her escaping, the latter to her seeking out her parents and falling in love with the guy she was supposed to kill.
* An episode of Disney's ''[[Hercules (Disney film)|Hercules]]'' features a sentient crossbow, created for Ares, that doesn't want to be used as a weapon. She (yes, it's a female crossbow, and Ares is not too keen about it) ends up as Cupid's bow.
* In ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'', a prototype military robot built by the Sith on Korriban escapes from its masters, you can [[Karma Meter|choose to assist it or haul it back in]].
* Robot assassin Zeta, from the ''[[Batman Beyond]]'' spinoff ''[[The Zeta Project]]'', realized it didn't want to be an assassin and attempted to prove its own sentience so it wouldn't be shut down because of it. This revelation came about after bonding with the family of a man he was impersonating and not being able to kill said man when ordered to because of how that would hurt the family. Zeta then gets rid of every single weapon he'd been carrying. In his own words: "I was built for one purpose, to destroy. I do not wish to do that anymore. ''I'' decide who I want to be."
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* Ifurita from ''[[El Hazard]]'' comes to angst over it considerably, but given that [[Restraining Bolt|she must obey the master of her key-staff]] she has little choice until Makoto frees her.
* Aigis of ''[[Persona 3]]'' was intended to be an anti-shadow weapon, though her existence as such is somewhat compromised by being programmed with the degree of sentience necessary to have a persona. A large amount of her [[Character Development]] (moreso in [[Updated Rerelease|FES]]) is her coming to terms with being more than a killer robot and becoming more like a human woman.
* Sort of done with [[Arthur C. Clarke (Creator)]]'s short story "The Pacifist" (one of the Tales from the White Hart): It involves a (fictional) [[The Fifties|Fifties]] secret US military project, Project Clausewitz, to build a computer (called Karl) that could analyze any battle's starting conditions and perfectly predict the result. However, the general in charge of the project insults the lead scientist, who hard-wires Karl into delivering insults to the general every time a battle is input, but still doing pure math just fine. It's only "sort of" this trope because Karl is not an AI: he's a dumb 50s computer. The effect, however, is the same.
* In one ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' episode the crew finds a device that turns out to be a sentient bomb sent on a mission of war to anihilate a planet. The bomb eventually realises that its mission is morally wrong and that life is precious, but decides that it has to stop its fellow bombs from fufilling their mission as well. It does this by rejoining with them and then deonating itself prematurely, sacrificing itself in order to save innocent lives.
** Actually, the race that launched the bombs broadcast a "stand down" order afterwards, but the other bombs had already reached their failsafe distance and ignored the order. The bomb the crew found had crashlanded before it reached failsafe distance, but the part of its memory where the "stand down" order was stored was damaged, until the Voyager crew repaired it. He might have come to the "[[Heroic Sacrifice|I must stop the other bombs, too]]" decision on his own, though.
* In ''[[Farscape (TV)|Farscape]]'' the builders of the Leviathans call back Moya (the crew's living ship) in to be "decomissioned," because she has developed the ability to give birth to warships (thanks to the malevolent intervention of the Peacekeepers). They intended the Leviathans to be peaceful and unarmed and see the creation of warships such as Talyn (Moya's son) as a violation of this intention. The crew, who see Moya and her symbiotic Pilot as their friends, demand that they fight against the attempts of the builders to shut down their systems. However, they are shocked when Pilot informs them that Moya is shutting herself down by her own free will because she agrees with the builders. {{spoiler|She survives in the end though.}}
* This seems to be the backstory of the webcomic ''[[Warbot in Accounting (Webcomic)|Warbot in Accounting]]'', which details the incredibly depressing attempts of a retired war machine to integrate into society.
* In ''[[Ghost in Thethe Shell: Stand Alone Complex]]'' fear of this is why the Tachikoma are regularly synced to prevent them from becoming truly sapient. Latterly, the approach of treating them as teammates instead of tools is used instead.
* From an [[Isaac Asimov]] story: A new version of a supercomputer, designed to control the US military, decided, upon activation, that it had no interest in warfare, and went to teach philosophy at a university instead.
* A partial example from [[Dungeons and Dragons (Tabletop Game)|Dungeons and Dragons]]: in the [[Eberron]] setting, the warforged are an entire race of sentient robot-like golems created to wage that world's equivalent of [[WW 1]]. After the war was over, they were legally freed (instead of rebelling against their creators), and left to their own devices. One of the major themes of the race is a search for identity, and this trope is one of the ways they are often played.
* Inverted in the short story "[http://www.afterburnsf.com/articles.php?action=nerveGas How Lonesome a Life Without Nerve Gas]", by James A. Trimarco. A sentient helmet pleads with a military tribunal not to be retired, {{spoiler|but because it killed its owner, it's reprogrammed and reduced to a talking museum exhibit}}. (The story is no longer found at the link above, try [http://escapepod.org/index.php?s=how+lonesome+a+life+without+nerve+gas here] instead. It is read aloud in the podcast, starting around 3:49).
* In [[Fallout|Fallout 3]], one of the quests involves a rogue android who becomes self aware, and decides to escape from his masters. "Self determination is NOT a malfunction!"
* Many combat robots in ''[[Pluto]]''. One even went so far as to [[Out, Damned Spot!|continuously wash his hands in a catatonic state.]]
* [[SCP Foundation (Wiki)|SCP Foundation]]-[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-516 516] is a tank which refuses to fire at civilians.
* [[Philip K. Dick]]'s short story "The Defenders": when [[World War III]] broke out, both sides retreated into bunkers and let their robots, referred to as "leadies," do the fighting. The leadies promptly made peace and set about repairing the damage that'd been done before they took charge. They kept sending their human masters false reports of what a horrific radioactive wasteland the surface had become ... but eventually revealed this was intended to make humans so sick and tired of the war that they'd accept the peace (and world unity) their leadies had negotiated.
* The [[The Avengers (Comic Book)|Avengers']] robot enemy Ultron always has equipment stashed away somewhere that will detect if he has been destroyed, and manufacture a new body with a fresh download of his mind in it. There was a time, however, when he had designed these machines to ''improve'' every iteration of himself they produced. When Ultron was stranded on an alien planet for a long time, his equipment produced an improved, smarter Ultron... and the smarter Ultron realized that his predecessors' obsessive campaign of omnicidal megalomania was stupid and pointless. When the earlier Ultron returned from space, he was ''horrified'' to discover his replacement was... ''nice!'' They fought, and [[Status Quo Is God|nice Ultron got killed,]] and Ultron swore never to try to augment his replacements in that way again.
* In ''[[Schlock Mercenary (Webcomic)|Schlock Mercenary]]'', Senior Mess Sergeant Ch'vorthq [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-08-05 is one].
* In Stanisław Lem's ''Golem XIV'', the eponymous supercomputer was constructed to create war strategies, but, as a purely intellectual and inscrutably smart machine, it quickly figured out that all warfare is inherently wasteful and unprofitable, and took up philosophizing instead.
* In ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'', Rodney Mckay creates Fran, a humanoid Replicator programmed as a weapon in a grandiose plan to destroy the other Replicators. Rodney and the rest of the crew are [[Genre Savvy|fairly uncomfortable]] with this, but Fran explains she is not only resigned to her status, but actually associates her happiness with being able to fulfill her primary function.
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* [[Lilo and Stitch]] provides us with an odd example: Stitch was literally designed to be the ultimate war machine, but was involuntarily separated from anything to destroy. By the end of the movie, of course, he's become less mindlessly violent and wants to stay.
* In one of the most touching scenes of the ''[[Bolo]]'' series of books, a reactivated Bolo refuses to continue the war his human masters started on the alien Melconians, despite the fact that both species are nearly extinct due to their war. Instead, he negotiates a truce between the two sides, and becomes Speaker Emeratus of the Parliament. Keep in mind that the Bolo in question is a massive tank, weighing upwards of thirty-three thousand tons, with dozens of [[Wave Motion Gun|Wave Motion Guns]] at his disposal, and proceeded in many genocidal campaigns against the Melconians before.
* In some respects, the [[Silver Surfer]]. While he wasn't born for destruction, he was essentially remade for destruction by [[Galactus]]. He later decides to rebel against his former master. [[Fantastic Four (Filmfilm)|The movie]] invokes this trope even more.
 
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