Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s new comedy-drama about OpenAI and the artificial intelligence arms race, arrives as a sharp, uneasy portrait of the people trying to shape the future. The film, shown at the New York Film Festival, treats the AI boom not as a sleek story of genius, but as a strange human drama full of vanity, fear, and competing incentives.
The result, according to the source account, is both funny and severe. It presents the rise of artificial intelligence as a moral argument playing out inside rooms filled with people who may not be equipped to resolve it.
A Tech Drama Built Around Uneasy People
Artificial centers on figures associated with OpenAI and the broader AI race. Yuri Borisov plays OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, while Andrew Garfield plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Ike Barinholtz appears as Elon Musk, and Mark Rylance plays Nobel laureate computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton.
The film’s character work is physical as well as verbal. The source describes Borisov’s Sutskever as moving with a heavy, awkward presence, Garfield’s Altman as boyish in motion, and Barinholtz’s Musk as entering rooms with a swaggering command over technical circles. During a post-premiere Q&A at the New York Film Festival, Barinholtz jokingly described his character as “a person who walks normally.”
That focus on movement matters because the film appears to frame history not as clean progress, but as something ungainly and unstable. Its major players are not presented as polished builders of tomorrow. They are shown as socially awkward, self-regarding, and often difficult to admire.
How Artificial Differs From The Social Network
Comparisons with The Social Network are hard to avoid. Both films dramatize major technology companies, and both include Andrew Garfield in a leading role. But the two projects seem to move in opposite directions.
The Social Network presented Silicon Valley conflict with a controlled, high-gloss intensity. Artificial, by contrast, is described as a black comedy that sometimes moves toward the surreal. It does not try to make its technology figures look grand. It pushes them toward ridicule.
The source also notes that Artificial is less a straightforward Altman biopic than a story built around Sutskever. In this telling, Sutskever becomes both a driving force behind the current AI wave and a figure burdened by conscience. That gives the film a different center of gravity: the key question is not simply who wins inside OpenAI, but whether anyone can slow down long enough to ask what winning means.
The Release Controversy Around the Film
The film reached NYFF with controversy already attached. It was originally set for release by AmazonMGM, but AmazonMGM dropped it this summer after Amazon struck a $50 billion deal with OpenAI. Indie house Neon then picked it up.
NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim referred to “the circumstances” around the film during his onstage introduction. The source argues that discomfort from OpenAI would make sense, because the movie is almost entirely unflattering toward Altman, OpenAI stakeholders, and the broader forces powering the AI boom.
The film’s view is blunt: the people pushing artificial intelligence forward are shown as vain, reckless, and dull. That is an unusually harsh frame for a movie about an industry often marketed around transformation, productivity, and world-changing innovation.
Safety Becomes Part of the Sales Pitch
The film’s central tension is the argument over AI safety. Borisov’s Sutskever is portrayed as a well-intentioned researcher who is temperamentally unable to lie. He pushes for safeguards, slow-downs, and AI’s “alignment” with humanity’s broader interests.
Against him stands the pressure for exponential technological and capital growth. The source describes nearly everyone else in the film as aligned with that faster, more aggressive logic.
One of the film’s sharper ideas is that even warnings about danger can become useful to the companies building the technology. In one scene, concern about OpenAI’s ability to cause serious harm is framed as good for business. Alarm can signal transparency and diligence, while the potential for harm can be treated as evidence that the technology is powerful.
That creates the bleak logic at the heart of the film:
- Safety concerns can support the public image of responsibility.
- Danger can be interpreted as proof of technical progress.
- Competition can make restraint look impractical.
The source connects this to wider fears about artificial intelligence. It notes that former Anthropic AI employee Jacob Coxon alleged that former colleagues described the next few years as the potential “endgame” for humanity itself. Another Anthropic researcher claimed that there is a chance AI could “kill all humans” within a decade, with odds set below 10 percent.
The Hard Question: Who Controls AI?
Artificial appears most persuasive when it moves beyond whether AI should exist and toward the problem of control. The technology already exists in the world of the film, so the argument becomes about who gets to harness it, under what rules, and for whose benefit.
The source compares this dilemma to nukes in the last century and notes that Coxon directly compared Anthropic to the Manhattan Project in his post-Anthropic exit interview. Within the film’s logic, ethics can start to feel abstract when every major actor believes someone else will move faster if they do not.
The article names OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Elon Musk, and China as parts of that competitive landscape. It also describes an early scene in which Sutskever and Hinton reject a Chinese investor who wants to use their neural network technology for drones and face-recognition systems.
That scene underlines the movie’s broader anxiety. The problem is not only that artificial intelligence may be powerful. It is that powerful tools attract governments, companies, investors, and founders with very different priorities.
A Warning That May Divide Its Audience
The film may not persuade everyone. The source notes that average moviegoers who mainly use AI for email rewriting or calendar organization may struggle to judge the scale of the warnings. The movie also complicates its own message by portraying nearly every character as deeply self-serving, if not worse.
There is another tension as well: a star-studded Hollywood film is delivering warnings about AI danger from inside a glamorous festival environment. The source describes a lavish premiere at a Rolex-sponsored film festival and an afterparty attended by stars, famous comedians, and notable filmmakers, including Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader.
As a message movie, Artificial seems likely to reinforce existing beliefs. AI doomers may see their fears confirmed, while committed boosters may be irritated by the contempt aimed at the industry’s leading figures. Still, the source says the film is genuinely funny in places, especially in its treatment of the people presenting themselves as engineers of the future.
Barinholtz captured the film’s uneasy comic register at the premiere with the line, “The future is bright! We’re all gonna be fine!” The nervous laughter that followed may be the clearest summary of what Artificial is trying to do: make the AI race look ridiculous without making its risks feel small.