How Modi’s AI handholding moment backfired as Sam and Dario refused to play along

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday invited leaders of some of the top artificial intelligence companies to gather on stage as part of a commitment to build more “inclusive and multilingual” AI around the world.

And they did. But what caught some of the audience’s attention, and later went viral on social media, was an awkward interaction between two rival tech leaders: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Modi, host of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, clasped hands with those closest to him — Altman to his left and Google CEO Sundar Pichai to his right — and beckoned all 13 tech leaders to lift their hands up in a chain, like theater actors at the end of a show.

Everyone was holding hands except for Altman and Amodei, who stood next to each other but for several seconds awkwardly avoided hand contact. Both eventually put up their fists instead.

The interaction quickly became a visual symbol of the deep rivalries in the AI industry, particularly between OpenAI and Anthropic, though Altman sought to brush off any deeper meaning.

“I didn’t know what was happening,” Altman later said in a video interview with Indian media outlet Moneycontrol. He said 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.”

Anthropic declined to comment.

The two AI developers have a history, one that predates the creation of OpenAI’s hit product, ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s competing chatbot Claude.

Amodei worked at OpenAI before he and a group that included his sister, Daniela Amodei, quit to form Anthropic in 2021. The newer company promised a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms aim to build.

OpenAI first released ChatGPT in late 2022, revealing the huge commercial potential of AI large language models that could help write emails and computer code and answer questions. Anthropic followed with its first version of Claude in 2023.

Their different approaches spilled over into public debate earlier this month in the United States when Anthropic aired TV commercials during the Super Bowl that ridiculed OpenAI for the digital advertising it’s beginning to place in free and cheaper versions of ChatGPT.

While Anthropic has centered its revenue model on selling Claude to other businesses, OpenAI has opened the doors to ads as a way of making money from the hundreds of millions of consumers who get ChatGPT for free. Altman took to social media to criticize the TV commercials as dishonest.

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O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com