Jack Altman, younger brother of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, took a public jab at Andrew Garfield’s portrayal of his sibling after Neon released the first trailer for “Artificial” on Tuesday. Writing on X, the Benchmark venture partner said he’d relish “a feature length film making fun of my brother” but joked that Garfield’s team “got right” only one thing: the walk. Pirate Wires founder Mike Solana echoed the sentiment online, calling Garfield’s rendition of that walk “uncanny.”
The trailer marks the first public footage from Luca Guadagnino’s dramatization of the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board abruptly fired Altman, only to reinstate him after employees threatened to walk out en masse. Garfield plays Altman opposite Yura Borisov as former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who helped drive the ouster, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.
Monica Barbaro appears as former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati, with Cooper Hoffman, Mark Rylance, Jason Schwartzman, Chris O’Dowd, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Koch and Billie Lourd rounding out the cast. Footage shows Garfield’s Altman leading a colleague through a gleaming OpenAI compound and down into a vault stocked with firearms, declaring in voiceover that “countries will fall” and “industries are gonna collapse” under the weight of the technology his company built.
The nearly $40 million film’s path to screens has drawn as much attention as its subject matter. Amazon MGM Studios financed and developed “Artificial” but walked away from distributing it earlier this year, months after sealing a $50 billion partnership and investment with OpenAI. The studio said the film would be “better served” elsewhere, a explanation that drew criticism online given the timing.
Neon picked up the project and plans an awards push, opening it in limited theaters on Christmas Day before expanding nationwide in January. Garfield has said he never approached Sam Altman directly while preparing for the role, relying instead on court transcripts, interviews and other public records. “Artificial” premieres at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 5.
