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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited leaders of major artificial intelligence companies to gather on stage at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Thursday, framing the meeting as part of an effort to build AI that is “inclusive and multilingual” around the world.
As the event played out, a visual moment from the stage pose drew particular attention and was widely shared online: during a group gesture designed for a photo, Modi clasped hands with leaders positioned near him—Altman at his left and Google CEO Sundar Pichai at his right—then asked the leaders to lift their hands up in a chain.
The sequence left Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei standing next to each other while they, for several seconds, avoided hand contact. All the other leaders holding hands as prompted was followed by the two rival executives eventually switching to a different gesture, putting up their fists instead.
According to the Associated Press, the interaction quickly became a visual symbol of rivalry in the AI industry, particularly between OpenAI and Anthropic, though Altman sought to downplay any deeper meaning.
Altman later described the moment in a video interview with Indian media outlet Moneycontrol. He said, “I didn’t know what was happening,” adding that he was “confused, like when (Modi) grabbed my hand and put it up, and I just wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be doing.”
The AP report said Anthropic declined to comment when asked about the viral exchange. The moment comes against a longer-running backdrop of competition between the two companies behind widely used chatbots.
Altman leads OpenAI, which released ChatGPT in late 2022, while Amodei co-founded Anthropic, which launched its first Claude offering in 2023. The two firms have also sparred in recent public debate in the United States, the AP said, including around Anthropic commercials during the Super Bowl that criticized OpenAI’s free and cheaper offerings, and Altman’s subsequent social media criticism.
The AP story also traced Amodei’s role to OpenAI: he had worked at the company before leaving in 2021 with a group that included his sister, Daniela Amodei, to form Anthropic, which has emphasized a focus on safety in pursuit of artificial general intelligence.