A Hollywood comedy about OpenAI’s firing and rehiring of Sam Altman as CEO is now being shot around San Francisco, and people are spotting big stars like Jason Schwartzman and Monica Barbaro in Dolores Park, the Marina, and SoMa.
Above is an image of actor Yura Borisov, best known as playing a lovable gangster in the Oscar-winning Anora. He's sitting in Dolores Park and portraying OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, the guy who engineered Sam Altman’s ouster as OpenAI CEO and then got booted from the company’s board of directors once Altman successfully plotted his comeback just days later. This is all part of that Hollywood comedy movie about this OpenAI drama, which will apparently also star Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore), Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown), and MADtv alum Ike Barinholtz as… Elon Musk!
That film is called Artificial and is now shooting in San Francisco. The Chronicle reports that people have been spotting the film shoots all over San Francisco this week, and we’ve embedded the best social media posts of these below.
Some pics of Artificial filming at Dolores Park today
byu/chrisandy007 insanfrancisco
Here’s a better look at that Reddit post with Yura Borisov playing Ilya Sutskever, as well as Jason Schwartzman playing some longhair bearded character, sometime this week in Dolores Park. Eyewitnesses say they also saw the film’s director Luca Guadagnino (Challengers) on the set.
Got some shots of the OpenAi movie on Lombard. Andrew Garfield nailed the Sam Altman walk!
byu/BtAotS_Writing insanfrancisco
And here we apparently see who’s playing Sam Altman, which would be former Spider-Man Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Spider-Man: No Way Home.) As SFGate points out, this shot on Lombard Street is not far from Sam Altman’s Russian Hill mansion.
Filming some Amazon movie about AI on 17th and Folsom. Cool. #sanfranciso pic.twitter.com/5nsTSlseXM
— Henry Wong☮️ (@thewongways) July 31, 2025
As seen above, the film was also shooting at Stable Cafe at Folsom and 17th. Similar film crews were also seen in the Marina, and SFGate says that shoot was at the famed Atelier Crenn.
Filming in the Marina?
byu/Ok-Guava-8265 insanfrancisco
There may be plenty more celebrity and film shoot sightings to come. The IMDB list of locations for Artificial only lists San Francisco and Turin, Italy as locations. The film is being shot by Amazon/MGM Studios.
So does that mean this film is a straight-to-Amazon streaming release, or will this movie play in theaters? We don’t yet know. Amazon/MGM Studios has released some big theatrical movies (Challengers, the Oscar-nominated American Fiction, and last Christmas’ Red One), though most of the studio’s releases just go straight to streaming. There is not yet any information about how Artificial will be released.
Image: chrisandy007 via Reddit
