Luca Guadagnino's Artificial will make world premiere at NYFF

The Sam Altman biopic had previously been scrapped by Amazon.

By Drew Gillis  |  September 1, 2026 | 11:03am
Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic
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Luca Guadagnino's Artificial will make world premiere at NYFF

Take it from the Coyote—a highly publicized decision not to release a movie is only going to make people want to see it more. Granted, there’s a big difference between scrapping a release for tax reasons and to (we presume) not offend a rising tech oligarch, which is certainly how it looked to most of us when the Acme Corporation Amazon decided to pull Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial from its schedule. Had the tech giant just chosen to quietly place the reportedly-unflattering portrayal of OpenAI’s Sam Altman on Prime Video, it probably would have come and gone fairly quickly. But now, after being picked up by Neon, the film is getting a world premiere at the New York Film Festival, with Guadagnino and unspecified members of the cast in attendance. 

Artificial will premiere on October 5, and stars Andrew Garfield as Altman, with Anora‘s Yura Borisov portraying the Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever. The supporting cast includes Mark Rylance, Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman, and Chris O’Dowd. “The most remarkable thing about Luca Guadagnino’s sly and sobering new film is that it finds the perfect tone to tell the story of how we arrived at the AI precipice,” says NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim in a press statement. “Artificial traces this trajectory with clear-eyed horror, dark humor, and a sense of existential urgency. If ever there was a movie for its moment, this is it.” Passes for the festival are available here; tickets for individual screenings go on sale on September 15. 

 
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