Altman and Amodei, who stood side by side, did not hold hands. Instead, both raised their fists.

NEW DELHI: At the AI Impact Summit on Thursday, there was a “caught-off-guard moment” on stage. When PM Narendra Modi invited tech leaders to join him on the dais for a group photo, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who ended up standing next to each other, stopped short of holding hands.Instead, the two AI rivals stood beside each other with arms crossed – a subtle but noticeable gesture that stood out during the otherwise celebratory moment.The moment when Altman and Amodei chose not to join hands on stage quickly went viral across social media platforms. The optics drew attention at a time when rivalry between OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and Anthropic, which develops Claude, sharpened. Both companies aggressively competed to position their models as the preferred AI assistant for users globally, intensifying an already high stakes battle for global dominance.Altman later clarified in a media statement, “I was sort of confused… (PM) Modi grabbed my hand and put it up, and I just wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be doing.”While CEOs of other companies joined hands, Amodei and Altman stood uneasily, their elbows touching.Altman and Amodei worked together at OpenAI till 2019. Amodei, his sister, Daniela and a group of researchers, left the company in 2020 due to disagreements with Altman and the board over the company’s direction, and subsequently set up Anthropic.Earlier this month, Altman hit out at Anthropic after the latter used a Super Bowl campaign to criticise a potential introduction of advertising within ChatGPT. The ads characterised such a move as a “betrayal”. The TV ads positioned its own Claude chatbot as permanently ad-free.Altman called this campaign “dishonest” and defended his company’s strategy of using ads, being different from what Anthropic portrayed. “We are not stupid and know our users would reject that… I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it,” he had said in a social media post.