Altman's AI biopic gets shelved faster than a failed smart contract 🚫🎬

Amazon has pulled "Artificial," its Luca Guadagnino–directed film about Sam Altman's 2023 ouster from OpenAI, from its release calendar and is shopping the nearly completed project to rival studios, Puck reported late Thursday. Mike Hopkins, who oversees Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, informed Guadagnino and the producing team that Amazon would not move forward with the planned release. "We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker—not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue," an Amazon spokesperson told the outlet. "We believe that 'Artificial' will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home." The film, written by Simon Rich, stars Andrew Garfield as Altman and Yura Borisov as OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, in a story drawing comparisons to the Facebook founding drama "The Social Network." Puck said an early script depicted Altman unflatteringly, portraying him as power-hungry and manipulative, and in one scene computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton called Altman "one of the most manipulative people on the planet."

A person familiar with Amazon's thinking told Puck the finished film's tone grew considerably darker than the original pitch, prompting Hopkins to halt its release after viewing a cut. The reversal comes months after Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI, and as Altman has cultivated close ties to the Trump administration—relationships Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos have also sought to maintain. Creative Artists Agency is now screening the film for potential new distributors.

In other AI-sector news, Z.ai released GLM-5.2 on June 16, claiming top-level performance improvements over its predecessor GLM 5.1. The Beijing-based lab, which has been on the U.S. Entity List since January 2025, has seen its stock rise 90% over the past week to a new all-time high, a move tied in part to the ban on Anthropic rival Fable and the new model's release. Midjourney, the AI image-generation company, separately unveiled Midjourney Medical on Wednesday, a new division developing what it calls "Ultrasonic CT," a full-body imaging system that combines ultrasound hardware with AI-powered image reconstruction and is designed to produce detailed three-dimensional body scans in roughly 60 seconds. The Algorand Foundation on Thursday announced a plan to make its blockchain resistant to future quantum-computing attacks by the end of 2027, laying out a roadmap to upgrade its network's cryptography in phases.