Sept. 8, 2026
The first trailer for the much-anticipated and surprisingly-difficult-to-launch film Artificial is finally here, and it looks like it was worth the wait. Starring Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man, The Social Network) as OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, and directed by Luca Guadagnino (Challengers, Call Me by Your Name), the film appears to paint a rather sinister telling of Altman’s rise in pushing AI and ChatGPT to the masses while waging secret wars with his co-founders and competitors.
The trailer starts with Garfield imitating Altman’s gait with astonishing perfection as he walks into his compound, makes his way through a security gateway, and then opens his laptop in an ominously lit room filled with walls of high-end assault weapons. What follows is a high-speed montage of the rise of OpenAI, as well as glimpses of some of the other players, including Monica Barbaro (Top Gun: Maverick) as Mira Murati, Yura Borisov (Anora) as Ilya Sutskever, Ike Barinholtz (Suicide Squad) as Elon Musk, and the voice of Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies) as Geoffrey Hinton. We also see what looks like a brief appearance of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who was an OpenAI executive before becoming Altman’s real-life rival in the AI business.
If you haven’t been following closely, you might have missed the fact that Altman’s ruthlessness with a smile possibly slipped into Garfield’s and Guadagnino’s own lives after they dared to make this film. Artificial was originally slated to be released by Amazon MGM Studios, but not long after Amazon sealed a $50 billion deal with OpenAI, the studio decided to shelve the project. Thankfully, the film was able to find a new distributor in Neon after much chatter about how and why the Altman biopic was almost killed.
Artificial will be released on December 25, just a couple of months after Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, which takes aim at the latest controversies surrounding Meta (formerly Facebook) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg,played by Jeremy Strong (Succession). Between the two films, Artificial is already looking like the more damaging framing for the AI business, but either way, this fall is clearly Big Tech CEO hunting season, and these trailers are drawing blood.
You can watch the full trailer above.
Cover image: a scene from ‘Artificial’ Neon
