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I'm digging through conflicting reports on what exactly is the largest robot in the Warhammer Universe.

I'm not interested in Titans or Knights, or Tau Battlesuits... unless there isn't a pilot involved.

Did the Necron World Engine have a pilot?

Would the Abominatus count? It's a Titan but it is possessed by a Bloodthirster so it may be able to operate without a pilot and crew.

Other then that I would think it would either be something from the Necrons as they have the most extensive use of AI constructs or possibly The Votann Ancestor Cores (if you consider them robots) as they seem to be able to get pretty big.

Warlord titan or variant.

Warlords aren't robots though, they can't operate without crew input.

Thanatar Siege Automata would be my guess at the largest but depending on your definition the Brass Scorpion or Kytan Daemon Engines would also be contenders.
Depends if you count Daemons as crew or fancy code.

Wasn't there a "larger that an Imperator" titan in the lore that was able to operate independently? It turned evil I believe.

Necrons most likely. They already have a Canoptek Knight sized unit and the likely reason we've not seen anything larger that's fully machine is because GW hasn't done a 40K era "Epic" scale game to put the Necrons in to give them a reason to have something to challenge an Imperator.


Eldar maybe if you considered something like the Infinity Circuit to be an intelligence - then you hit planet-scale.


The Imperum Imperator Titans are interesting because they are basically controlled by AI+Pilot+operator staff. In theory there's every chance that if they adjusted a few things the Titans could run fully on AI and the "Men of Steel" age an before could even have had fully automated titans.


Demon Engines are also another whole area but I'd argue those are demons not true AI.

Blackstone fortresses are pretty automated. Probably the same idea, but smaller scale, as the Craftworld argument put forward above.

Titans can operate solely by the Machine Spirit. It’s rare, and there are meant to be safeguards whilst it’s uncrewed, but it does happen.

However, they’re not necessarily sentient, being based on animals (Wolves for Warhounds, Bears for Warlord and possibly Reavers). And so when going it alone, they don’t reason beyond something akin to instinct.

But for now, the largest Battle Automata would be the Dark Mechanicum’s Heavy Stalkers.

Whilst very new to the setting, and introduced for 30k via Epic, I’m sure there’ll be at least some examples still knocking around with the Dark Mechanicum.

The robot armies that encircled the eldar empire and kept them safe for debauching might have still been around in 30k, or the remnants of them.

They were always described as actual robots rather than soul constructs like wraithguard. Which are pretty ghoulish and unlikely to be the basis for eldar robot armies when they were enlightened - especially as eldar reincarnated so trapping a soul in a robot would be pretty cruel. When the fall started though maybe it was a fun activity to trap them...

We've not had any descriptions of the eldar robots, only the indirect results of their potency - the orks were not a large threat to the galaxy for the entirety of Man's evolution to the stars, which could only have been as a result of Eldar supremacy. If 40k is what orks in the galaxy look like when something like the imperium of man 'controls it' there would have been 0 chance of humanity surviving past the solar system had it been equally as bad, or even slightly less bad during that time. Humanity would have never reached their Golden Age at all to have developed enough tech to keep the orks at bay.

In fact you can probably see an inverse relationship between the eldar downfall and retreat, rising of ork power and the equal rising of human technical supremecy. It's like a perfect storm of happenstance, where humanity's trajectory put them at just the right tech level at just the right time of eldar supremacy waning to avoid being wiped out by orks.

And then of course, the robot armies kept the eldar empire completely insulated from any external threat so they could focus on a species wide rager - not possible if you're interrupting society with invasions and world ending events.

I like to think the eldar robots were giant ship sized mother bots with psychic engines and made of wraithbone - the engine draws warp energy to rebuild the superstructre, making it virtually impossible to destroy. And them maybe they spewed out swarms of smaller titans and dreadnoughts they simply manufactured internally.

Kind of like a wraithbone iron giant crossed with Master Mould.

This riffs on the voidspinner wraithbone parasite concept, where they just released swarms of wraithbone constructs to deconstruct planetary surfaces.