The AI Doc: controversial AI apocalypse movie is coming to cinemas
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist has yet to be released, but some researchers who featured in the film are already regretting taking part.
The documentary is coming to cinemas on March 27th, 2026, and will feature prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researchers and safety advocates, including Eliezer Yudkowsky, Tristan Harris, and Deborah Raji.
The movie is co-directed by Daniel Roher, who won the Academy Award in 2022 for his documentary Navalny, exploring the assassination attempt of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny.
Roher says he decided to make the documentary at the time his wife was pregnant in order to know if “now is a terrible time to have a kid.” He admitted he didn't know much about the technology when he started working on the movie.
CEOs of major AI companies, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, also appear in The AI Doc.
Variety reports that the “strategy involved interviewing people the CEOs had referenced in their work” impressed the PR teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Whether this is a good sign for the documentary remains to be seen.
Based on the trailer, the movie is likely to perpetuate AI companies’ claims about the technology's destructive potential, which are usually followed by efforts to convince the public that their specific company or the US must win the AI arms race.
The trailer, for example, compares the technology to global nuclear war, and shows Altman and Amodei refusing to guarantee that “AI will go well.” There are also promises that AI could solve climate change and “cure most diseases.”
Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist, former co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute, said she made the mistake of accepting the interview request for The AI Doc.
She called one of the interviewees “an explicit eugenicist cult leader” and expressed concern about the lack of experts offering opposing views.
“They sprinkled some of us in like chocolate chips in a cookie, to do ethics washing for the real people they wanted to platform,” Gebru wrote on X.
Vehicle for doomer hype?
The movie has drawn comparisons with another AI documentary, Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine, which premiered on January 26th, 2026, at the Sundance Film Festival and will be available on the Kinema platform from March 26th.
Emily M. Bender, a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, wrote about her experience of being interviewed for both movies.
She described Ghost in the Machine as leaving viewers better informed, while calling The AI Doc “a vehicle for hype of the doomer-booster variety, presented through a very naïve lens disguised by high production values.”
“Instead of engaging in journalism (fact checking, what?), he just lets himself get buffeted by the imaginations of some of the most unhinged people in this space, and platforms their nonsense,” Bender wrote in a blog post criticizing Roher’s work.
The movie received mixed reviews from critics. The Verge concluded that the documentary “suffers from having too much access and not enough thought.”
Meanwhile, IndieWire described it as an “admirable attempt to find nuance on our era’s defining topic.”
Unlock more exclusive Cybernews content on YouTube.
