A meeting of two heavyweights. A refusal to lock hands, with the world watching. But this time it wasn’t cricket, even in a literal sense.
Eight decades after the start of the Cold War, a glimpse of what a similar conflict might look like in the era of artificial intelligence unfolded at the AI Impact Summit, in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, chief executive officers of rival AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively, shared an awkward moment when, standing next to each other, they contemplated for several seconds whether they should hold hands, as the others on stage were doing.
Modi had adopted his usual energetic physicality, encouraging everyone on stage to raise their arms and hold one another’s hands for the cameras.
To his right was Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who held Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang’s hand without hesitation. However, the real action unfolded on Modi’s left.
While Altman’s right hand was in the Prime Minister’s grasp, the OpenAI CEO’s left hand remained a fist in the air, as did Amodei’s right hand. Their elbows touched, but that was the extent of the contact. Not even their eyes met.
The frostiness seemed to carry echoes of recent India-Pakistan cricket encounters, in the Asia Cup and the ongoing T20 World Cup, where India skipper Suryakumar Yadav refused the customary handshake with his Pakistani opposite number, Salman Agha, at the toss.
Later, Altman told the media outlet Moneycontrol that he had been “sort of confused” and “wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be doing”.
The two CEOs share a history. Before Amodei founded Anthropic with his sister Daniela Amodei, the siblings worked at OpenAI. They left following disagreements over how OpenAI’s AI should be funded, built and released. They founded Anthropic in 2021, where they developed a chatbot called Claude.
Anthropic recently completed a new funding round that valued the company at $380 billion. In October 2025, Reuters reported that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, had reached a valuation of $500 billion following a deal in which current and former employees sold roughly $6.6 billion worth of shares.
Both companies consider India a vital market. Anthropic opened its Bengaluru office on Monday and said the world’s most populous country was the largest market for its Claude AI model after the US.
At the Summit, Altman’s company announced “OpenAI for India”, a nationwide initiative to expand access to AI, strengthen sovereign AI capabilities, and accelerate enterprise and workforce transformation across the country.
India is now home to more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users, ranging from students and teachers to developers and entrepreneurs.
In a 2024 conversation with podcaster Lex Fridman, Dario Amodei had remarked that the real reason he left OpenAI was that “it is incredibly unproductive to try and argue with someone else’s vision”.
The rivalry between Altman and Amodei surfaced earlier this year when Anthropic ran an advertisement campaign during the Super Bowl championship in the US, taking a swipe at ChatGPT.
The tagline, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude”, was a clear critique of OpenAI’s decision — without naming the company — to introduce advertisements to ChatGPT after having initially kept it ad-free.