# A Shelved Sam Altman Biopic Lays Bare How Tightly Tech Money Now Controls What Gets Made

> Amazon's MGM Studios suddenly abandoned a nearly finished film about OpenAI and Sam Altman, even as Google DeepMind poured $75 million into A24. Growing anger over data centers, a Meta employee data leak, and Anthropic's warming ties with Washington round out the week.

**Type:** article · **Category:** AI · **Published:** 2026-06-25 · **Source:** TrendKia
**Canonical:** https://trendkia.com/en/ai/sam-altman-para-bani-philma-achanaka-thnde-baste-men-samajhie-kaise-teka-arabapatiyon-ke-hatha-men-ja-rahi-hai-hollywood-ki-kamana-3072 · **Language:** English
**Tags:** Sam Altman movie, Amazon MGM, OpenAI, Google DeepMind A24, data center backlash, Meta data leak, Anthropic, AI industry

Hollywood and Silicon Valley are now so tangled together that it is getting hard to tell who really decides which films get made and which do not. The sharpest example this week is a movie about Sam Altman that was almost finished, only for Amazon's MGM Studios to walk away at the last moment. Alongside it sit a swelling national backlash against data centers, a major Meta data leak, and a notable shift in the relationship between Anthropic and the US government.

## The Altman Biopic That Stalled Before Release
The film everyone is talking about is called Artificial. It comes from Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me by Your Name and Challengers. It is a biographical drama centered on OpenAI, and specifically on The Blip, the moment in November 2023 when Sam Altman was abruptly fired by his board of directors and then swiftly rehired after almost the entire company revolted.

It has been described as The Social Network for the AI Age. The cast is stacked, with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Fittingly, Garfield once played the Facebook cofounder who was effectively pushed out by Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. The film was mid-budget, with roughly $40 million spent on production, and it was basically done when Amazon announced it was dropping it, saying it "would be better served if it were released by another studio."

## The Real Reason Amazon Backed Out
The decision has drawn criticism because it looks like Amazon doing a solid for Sam Altman, the very person the movie portrays unfavorably. The real reason is in the numbers. Amazon has $50 billion invested in OpenAI. On top of that, the two recently struck a $38 billion compute deal. So when Amazon says the film would be better served by another studio, what it may really mean is that the studio would be better served by another movie.

The ties are personal as well as financial. Sam Altman was a guest at Jeff Bezos's wedding last year. The film was always going to be unflattering for Altman because The Blip itself is unflattering for him. Many of his executives are said to have turned on him and orchestrated what has been called a coup because they saw him as duplicitous, telling different people different things based on what he thought they wanted to hear. In the film, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever comes off as the hero. He has since gone on to found another company focused on safe artificial intelligence.

## The Deepening Knot Between Tech and Film
This is a glaring sign of how thoroughly the film and tech industries have become intertwined. Amazon owns MGM. Paramount is being acquired by the Ellison family, the family tied to Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Tech billionaires are increasingly in a position to determine which movies get made and which do not. The same is happening in media, where Jeff Bezos has made some big changes at The Washington Post, the kind of influence that in an ideal world would not be exerted. Powerful interests have owned Hollywood companies for a long time, but this case is far more overt.

OpenAI is especially sensitive to public opinion right now. Like Anthropic, it senses that AI is growing less popular. There has already been talk of Sam Altman being ousted again before OpenAI goes public, possibly this year or next. As a result, the company is trying harder than ever to control its message.

## Google DeepMind's $75 Million Bet on A24
The other big deal of the week also raised eyebrows. Google DeepMind announced a $75 million investment in the indie film studio A24 to create AI tools. The question is how much of a dent AI is really making in the films we watch. From conversations across Hollywood, the takeaway is that AI is being used more and more for very specific purposes, such as storyboarding and rotoscoping. These are labor-intensive parts of filmmaking that used to take a lot of human work and a lot of money and that can genuinely be automated. Google DeepMind and A24 pointed to exactly these uses in their announcement.

A full AI-generated feature on the big screen still feels far off, and if it happens it will likely be a one-off gimmick. Part of the reason is the ick factor when audiences realize that something they engaged with was AI-generated and they did not know it, a reaction worth taking seriously. Still, expect more individual AI-generated shots to start appearing on the big screen.

There was a fear that Google would train its models on A24's entire catalog, but that is specifically not part of the deal. The arrangement adds another thread to the web. One of A24's investors is Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm owned by Josh Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner. Thrive holds a major investment in OpenAI and a major stake in SpaceX, while Warner Brothers is about to be owned by the Ellison family. In short, nearly everyone is connected to nearly everyone else.

## The Data Center Revolt, Now From Workers Too
Anger over AI is not limited to creativity. Across the country, the backlash against data centers keeps growing. More than 40 percent of homes in the US are now within five miles of an operating data center, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. The big AI companies are pouring billions upon billions into infrastructure to keep up with demand, and the construction boom shows no sign of stopping.

Residents are pushing back over higher electricity bills, water scarcity and noise. Now the workers who actually build these projects are pushing back too. Electricians are crucial to building data centers, yet some are asking whether the work makes them a sellout, whether it betrays not just electrician principles but broader human principles. One electrician even said it is genuinely hard to date once he tells people he is an electrician who works on data centers. It was likened to owning a Cybertruck. Working on a data center has become the new owning a Cybertruck.

The dissent is not only external. Some Amazon employees recently urged the Seattle City Council to regulate data centers, and a group of Amazon workers claim they are being investigated for speaking out in favor of regulation. At the same time, data centers and AI investment have in many ways become the engine of the US economy, which makes them very hard to slow down or roll back. Another problem is that locals see little direct economic benefit. When a town used to get a railroad, at least it gained added commerce. Here, even that is missing.

## Politics Steps In, With a Surprising Consensus
Politicians have entered the fray. It has been striking to see Senator Bernie Sanders become a vocal opponent of data centers. Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, introduced the Data Center Moratorium Act, which would halt the construction of new AI data centers until real national safeguards are in place. On its surface this reads like a left-wing issue, but, shockingly, it is fairly bipartisan, with members on all sides getting involved because their constituents are asking what this is doing in their backyard and how it helps or hurts them.

OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, previously a senior figure at Airbnb, came out championing big data center buildouts on the very first day of the Trump administration. The message was America first, build, baby, build, with jobs for everyone. But the company misread the moment. It did not realize how toxic the issue would become, and now, after putting out a press release for every new data center, it finds it very hard to change its stance.

Could this internal dissent from electricians and workers actually change the trajectory of these buildouts? It would be surprising. Google workers once came together to push back on Project Maven, a project working with the Pentagon to use Google technology for the Defense Department, and managed to get those launches paused. But the pushback from hourly workers has been minimal compared with the entire workforce. These projects are hiring thousands of people at much higher rates than usual, so there will always be people willing to do the work. Corporate-level opposition is rising too, but it remains far below where it was around 2018, especially with the job market for engineers now radically different. At one point Google fired a number of people for protesting, whereas before it had let such protests happen.

## Meta's Surveillance Misfire
One thing reliably gets management to listen to employees, and that is a colossal screw-up, which is exactly what happened at Meta. The company had installed software on employee devices to track every keystroke and all screen activity, essentially full surveillance to help train AI. This week it emerged that the company left potentially sensitive information from those sessions exposed and accessible to anyone inside Meta. In other words, everything a Meta employee did on their screen could be viewed by any coworker.

The full picture is even more jarring. Mark Zuckerberg feels he is behind in the AI race. He invested billions in building a new AI lab and spent heavily on specific talent. Then the company said it was spending so much on the AI buildout that it had to lay off 10 percent of its workforce, some 8,000 people. Then it said employees would have surveillance tech installed on their laptops, like it or not, to track their keystrokes and train the very models that lab was trying to build. And then, by the way, all of that data was left exposed by accident.

The one silver lining is that Meta announced it is pausing the data-gathering program while it investigates what happened. But it is only a pause, not a shutdown. The company said it would evaluate what happened and make sure it does not happen again before relaunching the tools. The face of many of those apologies has been Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, known as Boz, and it stings a little more because before the leak, when employees asked him point blank whether this was dangerous from a privacy perspective, he told them it was tightly controlled and used the same protection standards, storage systems and access controls as other sensitive data sets, which only makes you worry about those other data sets. Inside Meta, people call each other Metamates.

In leaked audio from last month, Mark Zuckerberg himself explained to employees why the initiative was essential. "We're in a phase where basically the AI models learn from watching really smart people do things. In general, the average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks. So if we're trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model's coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do who don't have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company."

## Anthropic Mends Fences With Washington
Another AI company, Anthropic, is at an interesting turning point too. Anthropic had a falling out with the Trump administration over its most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after the National Security Agency affirmed that there were ways to jailbreak and disable the security guardrails in these models. Since then, both sides have been searching for a way forward, with progress at times and stalls at others.

In recent days the administration has held multiple calls with Anthropic and appears to be making some encouraging moves. The main reason, though, is that officials no longer have to deal directly with the company's CEO, Dario Amodei. The administration is pleased that Anthropic cofounder Tom Brown and public policy chief Sarah Heck are now leading the outreach. As one official put it, "Tom Brown is not being a weirdo like Dario and can actually engage."

The stakes are serious. After the NSA alleged that the models could be jailbroken, the US government imposed export controls on them and said it was not acceptable for Anthropic to let foreign nationals access them. There was no technical way for Anthropic to enforce that, so it had to roll back access to both models for everyone, a very big deal for the company. The talks are essentially about what Anthropic must do to get the models back on the market, and what the government needs in order to feel comfortable that they can launch without becoming a cybersecurity nightmare.

The trouble is that the administration is asking for something close to impossible. It wants a model that cannot be jailbroken, which is simply not how these models work. The best that can be done, which Anthropic says it can deliver, is to make a universal jailbreak nearly impossible. That is why having someone who can discuss these issues on a non-technical, political level matters so much. Going forward, every one of these companies will have to stand before the White House at some point and argue why its hugely powerful model should be released.

Anthropic has spent a long time publicly insisting that AI is dangerous, that it could end humanity, and that its models are so capable at cybersecurity and hacking that they cannot simply be released. Dario Amodei in particular has positioned himself and the company in that specific stance, while also calling for heavy government regulation. Not long ago there was a major rift with the Pentagon because Anthropic tried to draw a line, saying its models could not be used for any military action or to build autonomous weapons. The Pentagon's response was that it is not the company's call what it does with these models, that this is American AI and it will do what it wants.

## What this means for you
- **For moviegoers:** Growing control of studios by tech billionaires can shape which films get made and which stories get blocked, potentially narrowing what you see on screen.
- **For everyday consumers:** People living near data centers can face higher electricity bills along with water scarcity and noise.
- **For workers:** Meta's keystroke surveillance and data leak are a reminder of how fragile your privacy is on company devices.

## Questions & Answers

### 1. Which movie did Amazon drop?
A film called Artificial, a biographical drama about OpenAI and Sam Altman, directed by Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me by Your Name and Challengers.

### 2. Why did Amazon drop the film?
Officially it said the film would be better served by another studio. It is widely seen as a favor to Altman, since Amazon has $50 billion invested in OpenAI and the film portrayed him unfavorably.

### 3. Who stars in the film?
Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman and Monica Barbaro plays former CTO Mira Murati. Around $40 million was spent on production, and the film was nearly finished.

### 4. What is the Google DeepMind and A24 deal?
Google DeepMind invested $75 million in A24 to develop AI tools for tasks like storyboarding and rotoscoping, not to train its models on A24's film catalog.

### 5. Why are electricians hesitant to work on data centers?
Amid growing backlash, some electricians feel the work makes them a sellout. One even said it is hard to date once he tells people he works on data centers.

### 6. What is the Data Center Moratorium Act?
Introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. AOC, it would halt construction of new AI data centers until real national safeguards exist, and it has drawn bipartisan support.

### 7. What happened with Meta's employee tracking program?
Meta's software tracked employees' keystrokes and screen activity to train AI, but that sensitive data was left exposed internally. The company has now paused the program.

### 8. How many employees did Meta lay off?
The company laid off 10 percent of its workforce, about 8,000 people.

### 9. Why is Anthropic's relationship with the government improving?
Outreach is now led by cofounder Tom Brown and policy chief Sarah Heck instead of CEO Dario Amodei, which has made talks with the administration easier.

### 10. Why did Anthropic have to pull its models?
After the NSA said Fable 5 and Mythos 5 could be jailbroken, the government imposed export controls. With no technical way to block foreign nationals, Anthropic rolled back access for everyone.

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