Andrew Garfield has quit ChatGPT after playing Sam Altman, the OpenAI chief at the center of Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming Artificial. The decision has an oddly familiar precedent, because Garfield made a similar move after portraying Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network. Now, after stepping into another chapter of Silicon Valley mythology, the actor seems to have come away with a very different relationship to the technology. 

There is a strange occupational hazard to playing people who helped shape the internet. Sometimes the research does not end when the cameras stop rolling.

Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Andrew Garfield explained that he made a conscious decision to stop using ChatGPT. He said that after playing Saverin in David Fincher’s 2010 Facebook drama, The Social Network, he immediately got off Facebook, and Artificial produced a similar reaction with ChatGPT. 

“I got off my ChatGPT immediately. I don't really know even how to explain why but just the more you know and the more you realize we're careening into some very unknown territory, Garfield said. 

His concern was not framed simply as a rejection of the technology. He also joked about the uncertainty around AI and jobs. Companies, he suggested, in the video, do not really know who will lose their jobs or what the future economy will look like, but they are moving ahead anyway and promising that everything will be “awesome.”  That mix of fascination and unease is particularly striking coming from an actor who spent months inhabiting Sam Altman, the real-world figure sitting near the center of that transformation.

Andrew Garfield Says AI Is Damaging the Soul of Humanity, Recalls His Strange Approach to ‘Artificial’s Sam Altman

Garfield joined Artificial in 2025, with the project bringing him back into technology territory after The Social Network. Luca Guadagnino directed the film from a screenplay by Simon Rich, with Garfield cast as Altman alongside Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Yura Borisov as co-founder Ilya Sutskever. 

The film takes audiences into the chaotic period surrounding Sam Altman’s sudden removal as OpenAI CEO in November 2023 and his return only days later. What looked from the outside like a Silicon Valley boardroom implosion quickly became one of the defining corporate dramas of the generative-AI era, involving questions of leadership, safety, governance and the future direction of OpenAI. Artificial uses that episode as its dramatic spine while expanding into the larger history and consequences of machine-learning development.

That makes Garfield's casting particularly intriguing because the movie is not simply presenting Altman as another tech billionaire in a hoodie. Luca Guadagnino's film is described by the New York Film Festival as a “thrilling, funny, and very human” drama that moves through two decades of machine-learning research toward the present AI crisis. Garfield has also said he never personally knew Altman, instead relying on the screenplay, interviews and research to construct his interpretation.

With Artificial heading to the New York Film Festival in October before its theatrical release, Garfield's ChatGPT confession adds an unexpected meta layer to the project. He played the architect of a technology that has become embedded in everyday life, then apparently decided he wanted a little less of it in his own.

Andrew Garfield Says AI Is Damaging the Soul of Humanity, Recalls His Strange Approach to ‘Artificial’s Sam Altman

What do you think about Andrew Garfield quitting ChatGPT after playing Sam Altman? Share your thoughts in the comments.