Recently announced to have its world premiere at New York Film Festival, Luca Guadagnino’s controversial OpenAI/Sam Altman film Artificial has dropped its first trailer. The news arrives following NEON’s acquisition over the summer, after Amazon MGM dropped out as distributor so as not to piss off Jeff Bezos’ tech bro buddies.
Andrew Garfield stars as OpenAI founder Sam Altman, alongside Anora co-star Yura Borisov as co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Artificial will center on Altman’s firing by Sutskever and the OpenAI board due to a lack of confidence, only for him to be reinstated days later.
Also in the cast are Mark Rylance, Monica Barbaro, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Hoffman, and Chris O’Dowd. Guadagnino directs from a script by Simon Rich that is said to be unflinching in its look inside tech bro culture.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher in Luca Guadagnino’s thrilling, funny, and very human ‘Artificial,’ a drama of immense moral urgency that propels the viewer through the two decades of machine learning research and technocratic recklessness that have brought us to our current AI crisis point. In 2003, Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) began studying artificial neural networks under University of Toronto professor Geoffrey ‘Godfather of AI’ Hinton (Mark Rylance). A decade later, while employed by Google, Sutskever fatefully crosses paths with a young entrepreneur named Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield), the eventual co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.”
Artificial is poised to be one of NEON’s big films this awards season. It will get a limited theatrical run on Christmas Day, before opening wide in January 2027.
