OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stood side by side on stage at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Thursday, flanked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Google's Sundar Pichai, and a lineup of tech executives. Modi lifted everyone's hands in a show of solidarity. Everyone joined in, clasped and raised. Everyone except two.
Altman and Amodei, who happened to be standing right next to each other, raised their fists instead. The chain broke.
The fist bump heard round the internet
Video of the moment spread across social media within minutes. "Nothing can make Sam and Dario hold hands, not even the Prime Minister of India," wrote one X user. Indian lawmaker Milind Deora piled on: "Everyone else locked hands. ChatGPT and Claude kept it strictly professional." Siddharth Bhatia, cofounder of AI startup Puch AI, offered a timeline: "When AGI? The day Dario and Sam hold hands."
That last one probably got more laughs than it deserved, but it captures something real about how the AI industry talks about these two. Their rivalry has become a kind of meme-layer shorthand for the broader tensions in the field, and the Delhi photo gave it a perfect visual.
Two weeks of escalation
The summit moment doesn't exist in a vacuum. Anthropic ran Super Bowl ads earlier this month that mocked OpenAI's plans to put advertising in ChatGPT. The spots showed chatbots mid-conversation pivoting into product pitches for things like a cougar dating site called Golden Encounters. Tagline: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude."
Altman did not take it well. He posted on X calling the ads "funny" and "clearly dishonest" in the same breath, then spent 420 words accusing Anthropic of being "authoritarian" and serving "an expensive product to rich people." That's the kind of word count you reserve for things that actually got under your skin. TechCrunch called it "a novella-sized rant," which seems about right.
Anthropic largely stayed quiet. Daniela Amodei told Good Morning America the ads weren't about OpenAI or "any other company other than us," which is the corporate equivalent of a straight-faced wink. Data from BNP Paribas showed Claude got an 11% bump in daily active users after the game. OpenAI's ChatGPT saw a 2.7% bump. Anthropic's user base is still far smaller, but the ad clearly did its job.
So what actually happened on that stage?
Probably nothing orchestrated. CNBC reported that Modi lifted Altman's and Pichai's hands before the crowd, and others followed. Altman and Amodei, standing adjacent, simply chose not to reach for each other. Both raised fists. It reads less like a planned protest and more like neither man was willing to make the first move.
Which, if you've been following AI's most consequential breakup, tracks. Amodei was vice president of research at OpenAI before leaving in early 2021 with his sister Daniela and several senior researchers to found Anthropic. The split came over disagreements about safety, commercialization, and the company's direction. In a 2023 Fortune interview, Amodei put it bluntly: "You needed something in addition to just scaling the models up, which is alignment or safety."
They've been competing for users, enterprise contracts, and billions in funding ever since. OpenAI sits at roughly a $500 billion valuation; Anthropic recently closed a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion post-money valuation. Both are reportedly eyeing IPOs before the end of the year.
The summit itself
The handshake refusal overshadowed what was supposed to be a serious policy event. The AI Impact Summit, running February 16-20, is the latest in a series of global AI governance gatherings that started with the UK's Bletchley Park summit in 2023. India positioned this one as the first hosted in the Global South. Amodei used his speaking slot to discuss "serious risks" of AI, including autonomous systems and economic displacement. Altman, per CNBC, talked about ad formats.
Which tells you everything about where these two companies are right now. One is selling safety. The other is selling scale. And neither is willing to hold the other's hand while doing it.
