Box office The film opened in 3,242 theaters in the United States and Canada on June 29, 2001, earning $29.35 million at #1 during its opening weekend.
A.I. went on to gross $78.62 million in the United States and Canada. Opening on 524 screens in Japan,
A.I. grossed almost two billion
Yen in its first five days, the biggest June opening in Japan at the time, and sold more tickets in its opening weekend than
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, although it grossed slightly less. It went on to gross $78 million in Japan. It grossed $157 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $235.93 million.
Critical response On
Rotten Tomatoes,
A.I. Artificial Intelligence holds an approval rating of 76% based on reviews from 201 critics, with an average rating of 6.60/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "A curious, not always seamless, amalgamation of Kubrick's chilly bleakness and Spielberg's warm-hearted optimism.
A.I. is, in a word, fascinating." On
Metacritic, it has a
weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on reviews from 32 critics, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on a scale of A+ to F. Producer Jan Harlan stated that Kubrick "would have applauded" the final film, while Kubrick's widow
Christiane also enjoyed
A.I. Brian Aldiss admired the film as well: "I thought what an inventive, intriguing, ingenious, involving film this was. There are flaws in it and I suppose I might have a personal quibble but it's so long since I wrote it." Of the film's ending, he wondered how it might have been had Kubrick directed the film: "That is one of the 'ifs' of film history—at least the ending indicates Spielberg adding some sugar to Kubrick's wine. The actual ending is overly sympathetic and moreover rather overtly engineered by a plot device that does not really bear credence. But it's a brilliant piece of film and of course it's a phenomenon because it contains the energies and talents of two brilliant filmmakers."
A. O. Scott writes: "Mr. Spielberg seems to be attempting the improbable feat of melding Kubrick's chilly, analytical style with his own warmer, needier sensibility. He tells the story slowly and films it with lucid, mesmerizing objectivity, creating a mood as layered, dissonant and strange as
John Williams's unusually restrained, modernist score." He concludes: "The very end somehow fuses the cathartic comfort of infantile wish fulfillment -- the dream that the first perfect love whose loss we experience as the fall from Eden might be restored -- with a feeling almost too terrible to acknowledge or to name. Refusing to cuddle us or lull us into easy sleep, Mr. Spielberg locates the unspoken moral of all our fairy tales. To be real is to be mortal; to be human is to love, to dream and to perish."
Richard Corliss of
Time magazine heavily praised Spielberg's direction, as well as the cast and visual effects.
Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of a possible four, saying that it is "wonderful and maddening". Ebert later gave the film a full four stars and added it to his "Great Movies" canon in 2011.
Leonard Maltin, on the other hand, gives the film two stars out of four in his
Movie Guide, writing, "[The] intriguing story draws us in, thanks in part to Osment's exceptional performance, but takes several wrong turns; ultimately, it just doesn't work. Spielberg rewrote the adaptation Stanley Kubrick commissioned of the Brian Aldiss short story
Super Toys Last All Summer Long; [the] result is a curious and uncomfortable hybrid of Kubrick and Spielberg sensibilities." However, Maltin called John Williams's music score "striking".
Jonathan Rosenbaum of the
Chicago Reader compared
A.I. to
Solaris (1972), and praised both "Kubrick for proposing that Spielberg direct the project and Spielberg for doing his utmost to respect Kubrick's intentions while making it a profoundly personal work". In 2009, he described
A.I. as "a very great and deeply misunderstood film", noting that
Andrew Sarris,
Stan Brakhage and
James Naremore "more or less" agreed with this assessment. Film critic
Armond White of the
New York Press praised the film, noting that "each part of David's journey through carnal and sexual universes into the final eschatological devastation becomes as profoundly philosophical and contemplative as anything by cinema's most thoughtful, speculative artists –
Borzage,
Ozu,
Demy,
Tarkovsky." Filmmaker
Billy Wilder hailed
A.I. as "the most underrated film of the past few years". When British filmmaker
Ken Russell saw the film, he wept during the ending. Screenwriter
Ian Watson has speculated, "Worldwide,
A.I. was very successful (and the 4th-highest earner of the year) but it didn't do quite so well in America, because the film, so I'm told, was too poetical and intellectual in general for American tastes. Plus, quite a few critics in America misunderstood the film, thinking for instance that the
Giacometti-style beings in the final 20 minutes were
aliens (whereas they were robots of the future who had evolved themselves from the robots in the earlier part of the film) and also thinking that the final 20 minutes were a sentimental addition by Spielberg, whereas those scenes were exactly what I wrote for Stanley and exactly what he wanted, filmed faithfully by Spielberg."
Mick LaSalle of the
San Francisco Chronicle gave a largely negative review. "
A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg." Dubbing it Spielberg's "first boring movie", LaSalle also believed that the robots at the end of the film were aliens, and compared Gigolo Joe to the "useless"
Jar Jar Binks, yet praised Robin Williams for his portrayal of a futuristic
Albert Einstein.
Peter Travers of
Rolling Stone magazine gave a mixed review, concluding, "Spielberg cannot live up to Kubrick's darker side of the future", but still put the film on his top ten list that year.
David Denby in
The New Yorker criticized
A.I. for not adhering closely to his concept of the Pinocchio character. Spielberg responded to some of the criticisms of the film, stating that many of the "so called sentimental" elements of
A.I., including the ending, were in fact Kubrick's, and the darker elements were his own. However, Sara Maitland, who worked on the project with Kubrick in the 1990s, said that Kubrick never started production on
A.I. because he had a hard time making the ending work.
James Berardinelli found the film "consistently involving, with moments of near-brilliance, but far from a masterpiece. In fact, as the long-awaited 'collaboration' of Kubrick and Spielberg, it ranks as something of a disappointment." Of the film's highly debated finale, he claimed, "There is no doubt that the concluding 30 minutes are all Spielberg; the outstanding question is where Kubrick's vision left off and Spielberg's began."
John Simon of the
National Review described
A.I. "as an uneasy mix of trauma and treacle". In 2002, Spielberg told film critic
Joe Leydon, "People pretend to think they know Stanley Kubrick, and think they know me, when most of them don't know either of us... And what's really funny about that is, all the parts of
A.I. that people assume were Stanley's were mine. And all the parts of
A.I. that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalizing were all Stanley's. The teddy bear was Stanley's. The whole last 20 minutes of the movie was completely Stanley's. The whole first 35, 40 minutes of the film—all the stuff in the house—was word for word, from Stanley's screenplay. This was Stanley's vision... Eighty percent of the critics got it all mixed up. But I could see why. Because, obviously, I've done a lot of movies where people have cried and have been sentimental. And I've been accused of sentimentalizing hard-core material. But in fact it was Stanley who did the sweetest parts of
A.I., not me. I'm the guy who did the dark center of the movie, with the Flesh Fair and everything else. That's why he wanted me to make the movie in the first place. He said, 'This is much closer to your sensibilities than my own. Spielberg said, "While there was divisiveness when
A.I. came out, I felt that I had achieved Stanley's wishes, or goals." On re-watching the film many years after its release,
BBC film critic
Mark Kermode apologized to Spielberg in a January 2013 interview for "getting it wrong" on the film when he first viewed it in 2001. He came to believe that the film is Spielberg's "enduring masterpiece". In July 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of
The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 258. That same month, it ranked number 61 on
Rolling Stones list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century." ==Accolades==