Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” trailer has dropped, bringing Andrew Garfield’s portrayal of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to life.
The forthcoming docudrama is set to premiere at the 2026 New York Film Festival at the Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on Oct. 5. The film, which stars Garfield as Altman and Ike Barinholtz as OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, was infamously dropped by Amazon, its original distributor, this past summer. It was quickly picked up by Neon, which plans to release it in limited theaters on Christmas Day before giving it a wider rollout in January 2027.
The teaser shared Tuesday offers the first footage from “Artificial” that has been publicly released. In it, Garfield’s Altman walks through a seemingly normal, luxurious OpenAI compound that leads down to a vault filled with guns and dangerous weaponry.
“We opened Pandora’s Box together. The future is inevitable,” Garfield’s OpenAI CEO muses in voice over as his character goes about his decidedly irregular workday. “Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse, and we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”
You can check out the “Artificial” trailer yourself below.
Written by “Man Seeking Woman” and “Miracle Workers” creator Simon Rich, “Artificial” will not be a traditional biopic about its OpenAI executive subject’s life and rise. Instead, the film promises to dramatize the period in which Altman was famously fired by OpenAI and then subsequently rehired by the tech company.
For that reason, the “Artificial” trailer fittingly ends with an unnerving confrontation between Garfield’s Altman and OpenAI Chief Science Officer Ilya Sutskever (“Anora” star Yura Borisov). The latter reportedly played an instrumental role in Altman’s OpenAI firing.
In addition to Garfield, Borisov and Barinholtz, “Artificial” stars Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Chris O’Dowd, Mark Rylance, Zosia Mamet and Billie Lourd.
Amazon’s decision to drop “Artificial” just months after the company signed a $50 billion partnership deal with OpenAI in February made it the target of intense criticism online. Despite its abandonment of the project, “Artificial” is still shaping up to be one of this year’s buzziest awards contenders.
Thanks to its subject matter, the film may have always been fated to be that, but Amazon’s treatment of it may ironically turn out to have only brought more attention to “Artificial” in the end.
“Artificial” hits select theaters on Christmas Day.
