“We opened Pandora’s box together.”
That’s a fairly ominous way to introduce a movie about artificial intelligence.
NEON has released the first teaser for Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s new drama about the rise of OpenAI, starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman.
And judging by the first footage, this isn’t going to be a comfortable Silicon Valley success story.
Artificial traces the development of modern artificial intelligence through the people who helped create it, beginning years before ChatGPT became a household name.
Yura Borisov stars as computer scientist Ilya Sutskever, whose early work on artificial neural networks eventually leads him into the orbit of entrepreneur Sam Altman and the creation of OpenAI.
Mark Rylance plays Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneering researcher often described as one of the “godfathers of AI,” while Monica Barbaro portrays Mira Murati.
Ike Barinholtz also appears as Elon Musk, one of OpenAI’s original co-founders.
The story eventually reaches one of Silicon Valley’s strangest corporate dramas: the November 2023 boardroom crisis that saw Altman abruptly removed as OpenAI CEO — only to return to the company just days later.
But the first teaser makes clear that Guadagnino is interested in something considerably larger than corporate politics.
Garfield’s Altman talks about an unstoppable technological future in which industries collapse and countries fall, while the footage moves between pristine offices, private conversations and a heavily stocked underground room filled with weapons.
It turns the story of ChatGPT into something resembling a technological thriller.
Artificial was written by Simon Rich and features an ensemble that also includes Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Chris O’Dowd, Billie Lourd and Cooper Koch.
Damon Albarn, best known as the frontman of Blur and co-creator of Gorillaz, provides the film’s original songs and score.
The movie will have its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 5 before opening in select U.S. theaters on Christmas Day, followed by a wider release in January 2027.
And if The Social Network turned the creation of Facebook into a story about ambition, betrayal and power, Artificial appears ready to ask a considerably more uncomfortable question.
What happens when the thing you create might actually change everything?
Artificial opens in select theaters on December 25, 2026.
