Artificial reenacts the five days OpenAI fired Sam Altman

Luca Guadagnino is dedicating Artificial to the ousting and subsequent return of Sam Altman at OpenAI. Andrew Garfield and Yura Borisov will star in this drama, which is expected to hit theaters in the United States on December 25, 2026.

A board of directors fires the head of the most closely watched company in the industry. Employees threaten to leave, Microsoft prepares to take them in, and the executive returns five days later with a largely overhauled board. OpenAI’s November 2023 crisis already had the structure of a movie. Luca Guadagnino has turned it into Artificial, a 140-minute drama written by Simon Rich.

Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman. Yura Borisov portrays Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and then chief scientist, who took part in the decision to fire Altman. Their confrontation provides the story’s main axis, but the film covers a much longer period than the governance crisis alone.

The New York Film Festival’s presentation begins the story in 2003. Sutskever is studying artificial neural networks under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto. The narrative then follows him to Google, where he meets Sam Altman, and continues through the creation of OpenAI and the fight for control of the company.

This timeline gives Sutskever a role comparable to Altman’s. Artificial is therefore not being presented solely as a portrait of a Silicon Valley executive. The film also follows a researcher who believes the systems he is helping to develop could become dangerous, caught between his scientific work, his loyalty to the company, and his distrust of its CEO.

Mark Rylance plays Geoffrey Hinton. Monica Barbaro portrays Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer at the time of the crisis and its briefly appointed interim CEO. Cooper Hoffman plays Greg Brockman, the company’s co-founder and president. Ike Barinholtz appears as Elon Musk, one of OpenAI’s founders in 2015.

Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Chris O’Dowd, Cooper Koch, and Billie Lourd round out the cast. Not all of their roles have been publicly disclosed. Guadagnino reunites with Andrew Garfield after After the Hunt, while the actor returns to a story about technological power 16 years after playing Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network.

The comparison with David Fincher’s film is an easy one to make. Both works depict a company that becomes central to society, founders turning against each other, and private decisions with global consequences. Artificial is neither a sequel nor a production connected to The Social Network. The screenplay was written by Simon Rich, a former Saturday Night Live writer, not Aaron Sorkin.

That comedy background should matter. Film at Lincoln Center describes the movie as both dark and funny, driven by continuous tension. For now, this remains festival marketing: the film has not screened publicly, and no review can yet confirm its tone or historical accuracy.

The first trailer leans more toward menace than satire. Andrew Garfield describes a technology poised to disrupt countries and industries. The staging connects that certainty with images of money, power, and preparations for catastrophe.

One scene shows Altman descending into the basement of a mansion stocked with weapons. That image is fictional. It appears to draw from a known biographical detail: in a 2016 profile published by The New Yorker, Altman listed guns, gold, medical supplies, emergency provisions, and property in Big Sur among his survival preparations. The interview did not establish the existence of the bunker depicted in the film.

The central historical event began on November 17, 2023. The board of the nonprofit organization that controlled OpenAI at the time announced Sam Altman’s immediate departure. In its initial statement, the board accused him of not being consistently candid in his communications with its members, without disclosing the specific events behind that conclusion.

Mira Murati became interim CEO. Greg Brockman left his position as board chair and then announced his resignation. Negotiations to bring Altman back began almost immediately, before the board selected former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear as a second interim leader.

Microsoft then announced plans to hire Altman and Brockman to lead a new research team. Almost all OpenAI employees signed a letter threatening to follow them unless the board resigned. Sutskever, who had supported the firing, publicly expressed regret over his involvement and added his name to the protest.

On November 22, OpenAI announced Altman’s return under an interim board chaired by Bret Taylor. Adam D’Angelo retained his seat, and Larry Summers joined the governing body. The other members who had voted to remove Altman departed. Five days had been enough to reverse the balance of power.

An investigation conducted by the law firm WilmerHale later examined the circumstances surrounding the decision. The summary published by OpenAI in March 2024 concluded that the former board had the authority to dismiss Altman, but that his conduct did not warrant his removal. OpenAI did not release the full report.

This lack of publicly available documentation gives the screenplay considerable room for interpretation. Private discussions, internal conversations, and the motives assigned to the protagonists will inevitably have been reconstructed. Artificial should therefore be viewed as a dramatization inspired by real events, not a documentary account.

Andrew Garfield has said that he has never met Sam Altman. He prepared for the role using the script, interviews, court documents, and other research. The result will reflect Garfield and Guadagnino’s creative choices as much as the executive’s public persona.

The focus on Ilya Sutskever could keep the film from reducing the conflict to a simple confrontation between an entrepreneur and his opponents. The 2023 crisis also concerned OpenAI’s unusual structure. A nonprofit controlled a commercial operation funded by Microsoft and valued at tens of billions of dollars. Its board was responsible for protecting a public-interest mission, yet its decisions could destabilize investors, employees, and products used by millions of people.

That conflict between mission and growth provides the real