Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman Movie ‘Artificial’ Will World Premiere at NYFF 2026

What a wild few weeks it has been for Luca Guadagnino‘s “Artificial.” The film, about the founding of OpenAI and its controversial leader Sam Altman, was set up at Amazon MGM in early 2025 and finished that fall, only to be dropped by Amazon in June after the corporation entered into a $50 billion deal with OpenAI for the AI company to use Amazon Web Services cloud functionality. Almost immediately after that news, Neon picked up the film.

So, what did that mean for the film’s festival plan and release strategy? Turns out, part of it will still look familiar to Guadagnino, whose latest film will premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival, which has previously played home to his “After the Hunt,” “Call Me by Your Name,” “Bones and All,” and “Queer.”

This time around, the filmmaker will be celebrating the film’s world premiere at the festival, as Film at Lincoln Center on Tuesday announced the late addition of the film to the Main Slate of the 64th New York Film Festival. The world premiere will take place on October 5 at Alice Tully Hall with Guadagnino and members of the cast in attendance. The news was first reported by Variety.

This year’s festival runs September 25 – October 12, and you can catch up on its massive slate right here.

Per the festival, “The stakes couldn’t be higher in Luca Guadagnino’s thrilling, funny, and very human ‘Artificial,’ a drama of immense moral urgency that propels the viewer through the two decades of machine learning research and technocratic recklessness that have brought us to our current AI crisis point. In 2003, Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) began studying artificial neural networks under University of Toronto professor Geoffrey ‘Godfather of AI’ Hinton (Mark Rylance). A decade later, while employed by Google, Sutskever fatefully crosses paths with a young entrepreneur named Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield), the eventual co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.”

The festival’s official announcement also bills the film as the director’s “biggest swing yet” in a “headlong plunge into our doomsday moment, with a script by Simon Rich that probes the increasing gray areas between human and machine, truth and lie.”

NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim added, “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. ‘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.”