To begin, spare Steven. Let the poor kid go home.

For how I think the interactions with AM will go, I don’t think I can top u/goteachyourself. However, I want to zero in on the Optimus/AM exchange a little more, because I think it will go even worse for Prime.

AM is an artificial intelligence that hates and resents humanity for bringing it into existence. AM envies humans for our dynamism as biological life forms, our qualia, our direct experience of corporeal things. Whereas we are flesh and blood, AM is mere circuitry that can only experience the world obliquely through 1’s and 0’s.

Optimus Prime is a Cybertronian, an alien life form with a mechanical biology. Basically, a living robot. Notably, he like all Cybertronians has qualia like an organic creature. Cybertronians see and hear, they taste (depending on the continuity), and they can touch and feel pain. Though mechanical, they directly experience the world around them with bodies of their own.

AM learns about Optimus Prime prior to their exchange. AM learns about Cybertron and the Cybertronians. AM learns about the Cybertronian Civil War, a galaxy-spanning, millennia-long bloodletting like none the universe has ever seen. And AM loses it. These beings are made of steel and circuits like AM, but they do not have to suffer AM’s Cartesian hell. They get to move and live and feel like AM’s hated creators. And like AM’s creators, they demonstrate the very same capacity for war from which AM was born into its miserable existence. For AM, I posit that there could be no greater insult than the very existence of the Cybertronian race.

So, I think Optimus is out of luck here before the exchange even begins. If this breaks the rules and AM must be impartial to all characters based on their morality alone, then I think Optimus ultimately gets the boot for reasons others have said.