Andrew Garfield has never met Sam Altman. That hasn't stopped him from becoming the OpenAI chief executive on screen.

Neon released the first teaser for Artificial on Tuesday, giving audiences their earliest look at Garfield's take on Altman, the man whose sudden firing and reinstatement at OpenAI convulsed Silicon Valley in November 2023. The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Simon Rich, compresses those four days into what looks like a boardroom thriller with apocalyptic stakes. In the teaser, Garfield's Altman offers a grim forecast: "Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse."

Garfield told The Guardian he built the performance without ever sitting across from his subject. "I don't know Sam Altman. I've never met him," he said, which puts Artificial squarely in the tradition of biographical films made at arm's length from the people they depict.

The cast around him reads like a who's who of the actual OpenAI saga, lightly fictionalised or not, depending on how closely the finished film hews to the record. Yura Borisov plays co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who reportedly led the push to remove Altman. Monica Barbaro takes on Mira Murati, the company's chief technology officer at the time. Cooper Hoffman appears as board chairman Greg Brockman, according to JoBlo, and Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk. Jason Schwartzman also stars, and Mark Rylance turns up as Geoffrey Hinton, the researcher known as the godfather of AI.

A studio swap, and a disputed timeline

Artificial wasn't always headed for Neon. Amazon MGM Studios originally held the distribution rights, then walked away. The two outlets covering the teaser don't agree on exactly when. JoBlo reported Amazon dropped the film in February, days after the company announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI itself, an awkward proximity that would explain the exit. Just Jared put the departure in June, with an Amazon spokesperson saying the studio would help the filmmakers find a new home. Either way, Neon picked up the project soon after.

Garfield addressed the shake-up in comments last month, saying he was "and wasn't" surprised by Amazon's decision, adding that the studio had been "nothing but supportive" during production. Hoffman was blunter: "When they dropped it, it was kinda like, 'Oh, yeah, that kinda actually makes sense,' but then it got picked up by Neon, which I'm so happy about."

Artificial marks Garfield's second collaboration with Guadagnino in as many years, following 2025's After the Hunt. It premieres at the New York Film Festival on October 5, with a screening at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11 per JoBlo, before opening in select US theatres on December 25 and expanding wider in January. Whether the finished cut softens Altman's on-screen prophecy or leans further into it is the question the festival crowd gets to answer first.