Altman and Amodei share a moment of awkwardness at India’s big AI summit

What could have played out as a simple moment of collective enthusiasm for global tech cooperation at the ongoing India AI Impact Summit instead turned into an awkward scene: When Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked speakers onstage to join hands and lift them in a show of solidarity, the executives complied — with one exception in tone. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised their hands, keeping a noticeable gap between them rather than clasping hands as others did.

As the heads of two of the leading AI labs in the race to build frontier models, Altman and Amodei are widely viewed as intense competitors. That competitive tension has only gotten sharper in recent months. After OpenAI said it would introduce advertisements to ChatGPT, Anthropic took a public jab at OpenAI by running a couple of Super Bowl ads that highlighted its stance, saying it would not bring ads into Claude.

Altman responded soon afterwards with his own criticism, accusing Anthropic of being “dishonest” and “authoritarian.”

“We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid, and we know our users would reject that,” he wrote at the time.

Altman and Amodei were both in India this week for the summit in New Delhi, which has featured a wave of AI announcements, investment plans, and product updates. OpenAI said it is opening two new offices in India, working with IT giant TCS, and rolling out tools aimed at higher education. Anthropic has also opened an office in India and partnered with Infosys to support both internal use and external deployment of its AI tools.