Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs refuse to hold hands at India’s AI Summit

CEOs of two leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, just had a very awkward moment at the AI Summit in India.

OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, and Anthropic’s head, Dario Amodei, refused to hold hands while on stage with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and other major figures in tech.

However, they held the hands of other people next to them. In a viral video, Altman was seen glancing over to Amodei’s side.

Eventually, both leaders were standing with one hand raised in the air.

The situation may reflect growing tensions between the companies, which reached the peak in February, when Anthropic released Super Bowl ads mocking the competitor’s decision to introduce advertising into its chatbot ChatGPT.

Altman called the ads “funny” but “dishonest” and said the company would never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them.

“Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that, and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions,” Altman wrote in his X post.

The awkward moment between the CEOs caused reactions on social media.

Siddharth Bhatia, a co-founder of Puch AI, joked that general artificial intelligence (AGI) will be achieved when Altman and Amodei hold hands.

An engineer, Israel Lifshitz, pondered whether the AI agents would act “more mature than their founders.”

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