The first teaser trailer for Luca Guadagnino's 'Artificial' has arrived, giving audiences a tense first look at Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and plunging viewers straight into the high-stakes corporate drama surrounding the artificial intelligence revolution.
The preview features Garfield walking towards his office while talking about how ChatGPT was built and its massive influence. His voiceover ponders the fast-paced evolution of technology, touching on threatened industries and widespread changes around the world. The clip also points towards the far-reaching and unsettling fallout of what he describes as opening a 'Pandora's box'.
OpenAI Power Struggle Forms the Film's Core
The film centres on the five-day power struggle at OpenAI in November 2023, focusing on the events surrounding Altman's removal as chief executive and his return to the company days later. The narrative examines the tension and confusion that unfolded during one of the most turbulent periods in OpenAI's history.
As the film's trailer arrives, a former researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic has offered a much bleaker warning about the technology being developed by the AI industry.
Luca Guadagnino’s ARTIFICIAL. It's coming.
— NEON (@neonrated) September 8, 2026
Starring Andrew Garfield, Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Ike Barinholtz, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and Mark Rylance. In select theaters Christmas Day. pic.twitter.com/M12NC7XU1F
'The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,' Jacob Coxon wrote after announcing his resignation from Anthropic.
Coxon said he had spent the previous three years conducting pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. He accused the companies of racing towards self-improving superintelligence and said they were 'gambling with our lives'.
Garfield's Bunker Scene Echoes Altman's Doomsday Preparations
One of the most striking scenes in the trailer shows Garfield's Altman entering a basement or cellar containing guns and other weaponry behind glass. The imagery presents a key architect of the AI revolution as someone contemplating the potentially devastating consequences of the technology.
The cinematic depiction also recalls a real-life comment from Altman. Long before ChatGPT made him a prominent technology leader, he openly discussed preparing for potential disasters.
'I prep for survival,' Altman told The New Yorker in 2016.
Altman said at the time that he had guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water and gas masks from the Israeli Defence Force. He also mentioned having 'a big patch of land in Big Sur' that he could fly to.
The upcoming film appears to turn that documented detail into dramatic imagery, though an important distinction remains. There is no evidence in the sources reviewed that Altman owns the specific underground shelter depicted in the trailer.
His comments to The New Yorker did, however, show that he had considered a range of catastrophic scenarios. Among the possibilities discussed by Altman and his friends was AI attacking humanity.
AI Researcher Warns of Self-Improving Superintelligence
Coxon's warning comes more than two years after the events depicted in 'Artificial'. His argument is not that today's chatbots will suddenly turn malicious. Instead, he argues that the industry is racing towards highly capable, self-improving systems that could eventually operate beyond human control.
In his posts, Coxon warned that future AI systems could become capable of hacking systems, accelerating scientific research and acquiring power and resources at a speed humans may struggle to understand or manage.
He accused OpenAI and Anthropic of racing towards self-improving superintelligence and said the companies were 'gambling with our lives'.
Coxon's claims represent his personal assessment of the risks rather than a proven prediction that AI will cause human extinction. Nevertheless, the contrast between his warning and the ominous depiction of Altman in 'Artificial' is striking.
Andrew Garfield stars as Sam Altman in 'Artificial', alongside a large ensemble cast that includes Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov, Mark Rylance, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Hoffman, Chris O'Dowd, Cooper Koch and Billie Lourd.
Luca Guadagnino directed the project, which was originally backed for distribution by Amazon MGM Studios before the studio dropped the film following its partnership with OpenAI.
Neon subsequently acquired the film and plans to release it in select US cinemas on 25 December 2026, following its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on 5 October. A wider theatrical rollout is expected in January 2027.
