A new film about Open AI and its co-founders has already been controversialA new film about Open AI and its co-founders has already been controversial
AI fears are growing – and unsettling new film Artificial puts them, and the future of humanity, centre stage
NeonLuca Guadagnino’s new film about Open AI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever offers a stark warning. Given recent news, its release couldn’t be more provocatively timed.
In September 2025, Luca Guadagnino completed filming Artificial, his sharp, entertaining cautionary tale about the creation of the company Open AI and the dangers of AI overreach. This week, it premiered at the New York Film Festival to great acclaim, and with one particular moment that resonates so strongly with recent events that the film’s timeliness seems astounding. The scene shows an artificial intelligence system outwitting a Captcha test designed to prove that an online user is really a human. The rogue AI has taught itself how to lie. And AIs going rogue is just what happened recently on a much larger scale.
In July it was revealed that Open AI agents – systems programmed to make autonomous choices – which should have been siloed from each other, communicated and coordinated during security tests to hack into the platform Hugging Face. That one jaw-dropping revelation led to even more, as Google, Meta and Anthropic all announced their AIs had also hacked into other companies. Open AI acknowledged its agents had even got into Australia’s government site.
Today, there are increasing calls for safety measures to ensure AI doesn’t get out of control. Even the leaders of the big-tech companies agree on the dangers and the need to rein things in – although not how to do so. What Artificial makes clear is that the risk of rogue AI was easy to see coming. The film was not prophetic so much as very lucky in its timing.
It traces the creation of Open AI as a non-profit, co-founded by Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield) and Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) among others, in the rosy days when they both believed artificial intelligence would only do good for the world. It then follows the company’s transformation into the behemoth behind Chat GPT, and the growing philosophical divide between Altman and Sutskever.
As grandiose as this sounds, the film is about nothing less than a battle for the soul of humanity, asking: Who gets to control AI and thus our entire future? It is a story of idealism v commerce, AI safety v recklessness, and angels v devils. On screen, the idealist Sutskever and the commercially-minded Altman – the fictionalised versions of them – embody that ongoing battle.
The controversy around the film
Artificial arrives with off-screen baggage that has only raised its profile. Amazon MGM Studios developed and financed the film, but in June announced that they would not release it. The timing raised eyebrows because, four months before that, Amazon invested $50m in a partnership with Open AI, where Altman is CEO. Amazon’s only comment has been its statement, “We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio.” Guadagnino said in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “The concept of a conflict of interest is a very important, let’s say, elephant in the room here.” And a Vanity Fair interview asked Altman whether he had spoken to Amazon or its head, Jeff Bezos, about dropping the film. He said, “I did not and I don’t know of anyone else who did.” In the end, Neon bought the film and will release it in cinemas in December in the US and January in the UK, well-timed to latch onto its current Oscar buzz.
Contrary to early speculation about Altman’s role, Sutskever is the film’s main character and hero. He is the voice of conscience and integrity, a scientific whiz who turns up at the door of Geoffrey Hinton (played with gentle charm by Mark Rylance), known as the godfather of AI, and partners with him on a company they sell to Google. Throughout, Hinton is a warning voice, sceptical about how fast AI could develop the ability to “think” and wary of what that might mean. When Sutskever leaves Google to create Open AI, with Altman as a major investor, he is wide-eyed and confident that as the science progresses, “all suffering will cease, all pain, all loneliness”.
NeonFor all its drama, in those early stages the film is infused with comic moments, largely from Sutskever’s social awkwardness and Ike Barinholtz’s performance as a preening Elon Musk. In one witty, relatable scene, Hinton is trapped in phone hell as he tries to sort out a billing issue, and keeps saying “human” as he tries to reach an actual person. It’s an apt word for the film itself, which doesn’t overload viewers with computer screens or lines of code, but focuses on the human interactions.
The portrayal of AI guru Sam Altman
The rogue AI incident is a turning point in the breach between the forces of idealism and commerce, of transparency and secrecy from the public. Throughout, we see the developing conflict from the perspective of the sympathetic Sutskever, soulfully played by Borisov. The film’s biggest problem is that the Altman character is so underwritten. Where we see Sutskever grappling with ethical issues, we only see what Altman does – making imperious decisions that sideline his colleagues – with no insight into why.
Garfield gives him shoulder shrugs, sweeping hand gestures and an almost childlike enthusiasm that curdles into something slick. But he’s more of a villainous contrast to the earnest Sutskever than a character. For his part, the real Altman, who had seen the trailer but not the film, said in the Vanity Fair interview, “I don’t think they’re going for accuracy.”
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The story climaxes in 2023 with the notorious incident in which the Open AI board, including Sutskever, removes Altman as CEO only to rehire him five days later. The real-life conflict is well-documented, with the board stating that Altman had not been “consistently candid with his communications”. Altman has regularly refused to address the charges directly. At a 2024 event in Davos, he deflected the question, saying, “Is this really what we want to spend our time on, like this soap opera rather than what AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] is going to do?”
After filming, Guadagnino added one especially current note to the film’s end. A postscript quotes Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher who galvanised public fears in September when he wrote on X: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The hand-wringing and pronouncements about what to do continue, with no practical industry-wide resolution in sight. In the angels v devils battle, this bracing film’s final warning is that the devils seem to be winning.
Artificial is released in US cinemas on 25 December and UK cinemas on 22 January 2027
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