Amazon has canceled its nearly completed film about Sam Altman, just four months after putting $50 billion into OpenAI.

      TL;DR

      Amazon has canceled "Artificial," a nearly completed film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's firing in 2023, just four months after investing $50 billion in OpenAI. Other studios are now expressing interest.

      Amazon MGM Studios has pulled the plug on "Artificial," a film by Luca Guadagnino that was nearly done and centers on Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, as reported by Variety and Deadline on Thursday. The movie, featuring Andrew Garfield as Altman, performed well in early screenings and was being pitched to other studios the same day Amazon announced its cancellation.

      This decision follows Amazon’s significant $50 billion investment in OpenAI as part of a $110 billion funding round, which also established AWS as the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI’s enterprise platform. While Amazon hasn’t revealed if this financial investment influenced their choice, the timing has attracted significant attention from industry media and technology publications.

      An Amazon spokesperson stated, “We hold great respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning director, as well as our long-standing relationship that we aim to maintain. We believe 'Artificial' will be better positioned if released by another studio and are collaborating closely with the filmmakers to find a new distributor for the film.”

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

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

      Written by former SNL writer Simon Rich, the film was produced on a budget of around $40 million.

      Insiders who have viewed the film suggest that the characters of Altman and Musk are depicted as the least sympathetic, being those audiences might “like the least.” Reports also indicate that the finished film's tone became much darker than Amazon initially anticipated when greenlighting the project, although the company reviewed all early script drafts before Guadagnino was involved.

      The financial links between Amazon and OpenAI are significant. Amazon's $50 billion investment was part of a major restructuring of partnerships within the AI industry. OpenAI committed to investing $100 billion in AWS computing resources and Trainium chips over eight years, with AWS designated as the exclusive third-party cloud distributor for OpenAI Frontier, the company's enterprise AI platform.

      There’s also a personal element; Altman attended the wedding of Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in Venice, Italy, in June 2025. It remains unclear whether the business relationship or personal ties factored into the decision to abandon the film, yet many observers find it hard to ignore the implications of the situation.

      Altman has become a controversial figure in public discourse. Earlier this year, an individual was charged with attempted murder for throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco residence and threatening to set fire to OpenAI’s headquarters, reflecting a broader wave of backlash against AI leadership.

      The Musk v. Altman lawsuit, which concerned OpenAI’s shift from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure, played out publicly earlier this year and highlighted the internal dynamics dramatized in "Artificial." Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI who left the board in 2018, has been one of Altman’s most outspoken critics.

      Amazon’s choice to shelve "Artificial" isn’t unusual in Hollywood, where studios frequently cancel projects for various creative or strategic reasons. However, the combination of a $50 billion investment, a personal friendship between the studio owner and the film's subject, and a completed movie reportedly portraying that subject unfavorably makes this scenario harder to dismiss as a standard business decision.

      Now, other studios are being shown the film. For a movie addressing the complex politics of the AI industry, losing its distributor to a tangled web of AI-related politics remains thematically coherent.