The Story of the Machine's Makers Cannot Find a Home

On Artificial, the $40 million Sam Altman biopic nobody with money to OpenAI would release

The most revealing film of the AI era may be a film about the people building it — and the fact that no studio with money in those people could bring itself to release it.

Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, a $40 million biopic starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, was dropped by Amazon after the studio announced a blockbuster partnership with the very company its subject runs. Amazon's statement was a model of corporate politeness: it had "the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino," and believed the film "will be better served if it were released by a different studio." The timing was not subtle. Amazon's deal with OpenAI involved an immediate $15 billion investment, followed by another $35 billion once conditions were met — on top of a $38 billion cloud computing deal the two companies signed the year before. A nearly finished film, wrapped since last autumn and poised for an awards run, was walked away from because the studio had decided it could not afford to distribute a story about the CEO of the company it had just bet $50 billion on.

The film, written by Simon Rich, centers on the dramatic firing and rehiring of Altman in November 2023 — the week the board of OpenAI briefly removed its CEO, then reinstated him days later. The portrayal, per reporting, is not flattering. The hero of Rich's script is not Altman but Ilya Sutskever — played by Anora star Yura Borisov — the OpenAI co-founder who voted to oust Altman, then stepped down from the board after Altman's return. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk. The film's implicit thesis, that the board members who tried to stop the acceleration were the ones worth telling, is exactly the story the companies funding AI would prefer not to circulate.

After Amazon walked, the film circulated — and Netflix, A24, and Focus all passed. It was ultimately picked up by Neon, which secured worldwide rights and announced "Artificial will compete in this year's Oscar race." Neon is the distributor that has carved out a lane as the refuge for the films the conglomerates won't touch — the same Neon that handled Parasite's historic run and that my colleague and I have watched turn indie distribution into a viable counterweight to the streamers. But it is worth sitting with the list of who declined. Netflix, A24, Focus — the entire center of gravity of prestige American film — all found reasons not to carry a completed, well-regarded film about the most consequential technology story of the decade. The reasons were never stated, but they did not need to be. Each of those companies either invests in AI, partners with it, or relies on the goodwill of the people who run it. None of them could afford to be the studio that released an unflattering portrait of Sam Altman.

This is the story underneath the story, and it is the story The Mirror exists to tell. We have spent this year watching institutions draw lines about AI — the Academy protecting its guilds, BAFTA protecting its national industry, the labels proposing a "substantially human made" standard they cannot define. All of those are the culture deciding where the machine ends and the human begins. But Artificial exposes a different and more chilling line: the line that decides not what counts as authorship, but which stories about AI get to be told at all. The problem is not that AI can't be criticized. It is that the criticism has to pass through the companies that fund the thing being criticized, and those companies have decided, one by one, that the story of the machine's makers is not a story they are in the business of financing.

The irony compounds. The film is called Artificial — a title that gestures at both artificial intelligence and at something fake, manufactured, not quite real. The subject, Altman, is the CEO of the company that wants to build minds. The film is being distributed by Neon precisely because the firms with the deepest ties to that company could not stomach carrying it. The story of the people who want to create intelligence is being treated as contraband by the very infrastructure that wants to sell that intelligence to the world. The machine can be marketed; the making of the machine, told honestly, cannot.

I wrote in July about the A24/DeepMind deal, about what the "seat at the table" framing hides when the table is owned by the companies whose interests the films might otherwise examine. Artificial is that argument made concrete. The consolidation is not just of capital but of narrative — the power to decide which stories about AI reach an audience now sits with the same entities that profit from AI. A film that asks hard questions about the people building the machines has to be rescued by an indie distributor operating at the margins, because the center has become structurally incapable of telling that story.

The release itself, when Neon puts it out later this year, will be a kind of test. The film is reportedly good — the Guardian notes it had been "circling" an awards campaign before Amazon's reversal. If audiences respond, if the portrait of the OpenAI board's week of courage and collapse lands, then the industry will have to reckon with the fact that the story it refused to tell found its audience anyway. And if it disappears, if the Neon release is modest and the film is absorbed as a curio, then the lesson will be quieter and more corrosive: that the companies building the future of intelligence have also secured the right to decide how their own story is told. Either way, the fact that a finished, well-made film about the makers of the machine had to beg for a home among companies with no stake in the machine is the most honest account we have of who actually controls the narrative of the age.