Ben Affleck says he used AI on Animals and won't say where

Ben Affleck said he used artificial intelligence "for lots of things" in Animals, the kidnapping thriller he co-wrote, directed and stars in, and he will not say which parts. Netflix released the film in select theaters and on its streaming service on October 9, 2026.

Affleck made the admission on September 30 at Bloomberg's 2026 Screentime event in Los Angeles, speaking with Bloomberg reporter Lucas Shaw. The Hollywood Reporter carried the remarks, and its account is the one used here.

"I used AI for lots of things in that movie," Affleck said. "I'm a little bit hesitant to point out what they are, or even talk about it, because in my business, we're trying to foster the illusion of reality, right?"

He compared naming the specific uses to a magician walking out before the show and telling the audience there is another rabbit under the table. The AI work, he said, was mostly in post-production, and he called Animals "a very human movie" because it has no space settings and no heavy visual effects.

The tools came from InterPositive, the AI filmmaking company Affleck founded in 2022. Netflix announced it was buying InterPositive on March 5, and the streamer disclosed a $587 million cash purchase price in a securities filing in July, according to Variety. Bloomberg had reported in March that the deal could be worth up to $600 million. Affleck became a senior adviser at Netflix after the sale, and InterPositive's 16-person team joined.

Netflix has been open about AI elsewhere. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in the company's second-quarter earnings report that roughly 300 Netflix titles have used generative AI this year, and he cited 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage in "The American Experiment," made "twice as fast and at half the cost of previous options."

Affleck's own account of how he got there is in Business Insider's write-up of the Screentime event. He said his first reaction to the early AI output was a "heart attack," and that he called Matt Damon.

At the film's premiere in Los Angeles on October 1, Affleck went further with The Hollywood Reporter. He said he would not use a tool trained on copyrighted work or on the intelligence of a peer, which is why InterPositive built a dataset that was proprietary, "so that it wouldn't have to be extractive." He called the result "a discrete set of tools" that are "not about making fake people or replacing anybody, ever."

The posture sits against a harder line from elsewhere in Hollywood: Nicolas Cage told New York Comic Con on October 10 that he refused to sign an AI waiver on Amazon's Spider-Noir and is "probably not" going to work with that studio again, Variety reported.

For creators, what Affleck has claimed is narrow. He says nothing was trained on other people's work and that the tools are invisible when they work, and Netflix has not published a list of the shots it touched. The test of his argument is whether he names the uses later.

Affleck used AI on Animals, and more than a week after the event, he still has not said where.

Animals began streaming on Netflix and opened in select theaters on October 9.