An awkward moment ensued at the India AI Summit stage this morning when the CEOs of rival AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic refused to hold hands for a group photograph. The awkwardness was caught on camera and has since become the subject of many jokes on social media.
While the moment has gone viral online, the awkwardness was not entirely unexpected. Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei had quit OpenAI in 2021 due to differences with Sam Altman.
Here’s what happened at the AI summit
After the keynote address at the India AI Impact Summit this morning, a handful of VIP tech leaders got onstage for a photograph with PM Narendra Modi. The group consisted of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, among others.
Once onstage, PM Modi held the hands of the two CEOs standing on either side of him — Sundar Pichai and Sam Altman — and encouraged them to raise their hands for a photograph.
The awkwardness became apparent when OpenAI’s Sam Altman and the CEO to his other side, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, refused to hold hands. Instead, they both raised their fists in the air.
{{/usCountry}}The awkwardness became apparent when OpenAI’s Sam Altman and the CEO to his other side, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, refused to hold hands. Instead, they both raised their fists in the air.
{{/usCountry}}The moment did not go unnoticed on social media, quickly becoming a trending topic on X.
However, when asked about the incident in a closed-door meeting with reporters, Altman said he did not know what was happening. The OpenAI CEO said he was “confused”, adding that PM Modi “grabbed my hand and put it up”
“I wasn't sure what we were supposed to be doing,” he added.
The OpenAI vs Anthropic rivalry
OpenAI and Anthropic are today among the most recognisable names in artificial intelligence, but they represent slightly different ways of building the technology. OpenAI is known for moving quickly and making AI tools like ChatGPT widely available to the public. Anthropic, meanwhile, claims to place stronger emphasis on safety and careful behaviour, especially through its flagship Claude chatbot.
What Anthropic CEO said
Dario Amodei — who was Vice-President of Research at OpenAI — left the company in early 2021 to co-found Anthropic with his sister and several other senior OpenAI researchers. He stepped away from OpenAI after becoming increasingly concerned about the direction the organisation was taking.
In a 2023 interview with Fortune magazine, Amodei had confirmed that he quit OpenAI due to directional differences. “You needed something in addition to just scaling the models up, which is alignment or safety. You don't tell the models what their values are just by pouring more compute into them,” he said.