Amazon has canceled its nearly completed Sam Altman film, just four months after investing $50 billion in OpenAI.

      Amazon has decided to drop Artificial, a nearly completed film by Luca Guadagnino that depicts the 2023 firing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, just four months after investing $50 billion in OpenAI. Reports from Variety and Deadline on Thursday confirmed that the film, featuring Andrew Garfield as Altman, had received positive feedback from early audiences and was being presented to other studios the same day Amazon announced its decision not to release it.

      This move follows Amazon's hefty $50 billion commitment to OpenAI during a $110 billion funding round, which also established AWS as the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI's enterprise platform. While Amazon has not clarified whether its financial ties with OpenAI affected their decision, the timing has drawn significant attention from industry and tech analysts.

      An Amazon representative expressed great respect for Guadagnino, noting a desire to maintain their ongoing relationship. The spokesperson commented, “We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are actively collaborating with the filmmaking team to find a new home for the film.”

      Artificial is a comedic drama that explores the tumultuous five days in November 2023 when Altman was suddenly fired by OpenAI’s board and subsequently reinstated. At that time, the board claimed that Altman had not been “consistently candid” in his communications. Microsoft quickly offered him a job, while most of OpenAI's approximately 770 employees threatened to resign if he wasn't reinstated.

      The cast features more than just Garfield; Monica Barbaro portrays former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov plays former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Ike Barinholtz takes on the role of Elon Musk. Other notable actors include Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Angus Imrie, Chris O’Dowd, and Mark Rylance.

      The screenplay was penned by Simon Rich, an alumnus of SNL, and the film was produced with an estimated budget of around $40 million. According to Variety, sources who viewed the film remarked that Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic characters and are likely the ones audiences would "like the least." Reports also suggest that the finished film's tone became significantly darker than what Amazon had anticipated at the project's outset, despite the company's prior review of all script iterations before Guadagnino was involved.

      Amazon’s financial links to OpenAI are substantial, with the $50 billion investment being part of a major restructuring within the AI industry's partnership framework. OpenAI pledged to allocate $100 billion towards AWS computing resources and Trainium chips over eight years, and AWS was granted exclusive third-party cloud distribution rights for OpenAI Frontier, its enterprise AI platform.

      There’s also a personal aspect to consider. Altman attended the wedding of Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in Venice, Italy, in June 2025. Whether these business or personal ties influenced the decision to drop the film remains unverified, but as several outlets have pointed out, the optics are challenging to disentangle from the resulting outcome.

      Altman has become a divisive figure in the public sphere. Earlier this year, an individual was charged with attempted murder after throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s residence in San Francisco and threatening to set OpenAI’s headquarters ablaze, part of a broader surge of anti-AI sentiment aimed at the company's leadership.

      The Musk v. Altman trial, centering on a $150 billion lawsuit concerning OpenAI's transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit model, unfolded earlier this year, highlighting internal dynamics that will be dramatized in Artificial. Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI who departed from the board in 2018, has been one of Altman's most vociferous critics.

      While Amazon's choice to shelve Artificial is not an unusual occurrence in Hollywood—where studios frequently abort projects for creative or strategic reasons—the intersection of a $50 billion investment, a personal friendship between the studio head and the film's subject, alongside a completed film that reportedly portrays that subject in a negative light, creates a scenario that is not easily dismissed as a standard business decision.

      Other studios are currently being shown the film. For a movie centered around the intricate politics of the AI sector, losing its distributor due to the sector's messy politics is thematically consistent.