Andrew Garfield says playing Sam Altman made him quit ChatGPT

Andrew Garfield attends the premiere of “Artificial” during the 64th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, on Monday, Oct. 5, 2026, in New York.

Andrew Garfield says he stopped using ChatGPT. All it took was playing Sam Altman.

The actor who stars as the OpenAI CEO in Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” admits that after working on the film, his “mistrusting of the technology” has deepened.

“I got a bit scared,” he told Variety after the San Francisco-set movie made its world premiere at the New York Film Festival this week. “It feels like the people who are encouraging us to use the technologies don’t exactly know its capacities themselves. That feels a little irresponsible, to me personally.”

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“Artificial” focuses on the five-day power struggle that temporarily led to Altman’s ouster as CEO, but it also traces the rise of artificial intelligence and its great promise — and potential threat — to our daily lives.

Garfield stars alongside two fellow Oscar nominees — Yura Borisov (“Anora”) as idealistic OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Bay Area native Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, the company’s former interim CEO — as well as Oscar-winner Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI”; and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, an OpenAI co-founder who turned into as bitter rival of Altman.

Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever in Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial.”

“Luckily, I don’t need (ChatGPT) in my life in the same way that other people in other industries might,” Garfield said. “As an actor, I was using it as a kind of fancy Google for some research purposes. I know that it’s not what it’s meant for.”

Garfield has drawn praise for his portrayal of Altman in early reviews. TheWrap’s Zachary Lee, for example, said he “perfectly captures what makes Altman so charismatic and alluring.”

Meanwhile, the Daily Beast’s Nick Shrager observed that Garfield plays Altman as a “weirdo” and “the phoniest and most amoral of toxic tech bros.”

But perhaps the biggest compliment Garfield has received is from Altman himself. The tech mogul told Vanity Fair that he marveled at the actor’s replication of his walk and other mannerisms.

“That’s a very generous thing for him to say,” Garfield told Variety. “I imagine it must be incredibly strange and surreal to be a young man, as he is, to know that there’s a film where a version of him is being depicted. I feel quite sensitive and compassionate towards that. I’d personally feel really vulnerable and probably angry. That’s just me. He seems very chill about it.”

“Artificial” is due in theaters on Dec. 25.