A snippet of an interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about the India AI Summit has snowballed into a political controversy after he recalled how “extremely disorganised” the February summit in New Delhi was.

During the interview, Bloomberg's Emily Chang asked Amodei about the "awkward moment" in which he appeared to refuse to hold hands with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, seeking clarification on what had actually happened.

“What happened is that the summit was extremely disorganised,” Amodei replied. “We all came up at the last minute, and they changed the order in which we were standing. And, then they took a picture of us, they ordered us all to, like, hold hands.”

During the discussion, he described how participants were unexpectedly rearranged on stage before being asked to join hands for a ceremonial photograph.

He doubled up in laughter while narrating how Prime Minister Narendra Modi was present on stage “asking everyone to hold hands for the picture”.

This led to the Opposition leaders having a field day with Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi claiming the February-summit was for “Artificial Image Management”.

The clip is being widely shared on social media.

The BJP’s Amit Malviya claimed the video was “edited” to “malign the successful summit”.

He said that the opposition parties have purposefully ignored the part where Amodei had clarified that such high-profile events often had situations like this and he had nothing “bad” to say about India.

The remarks since then have gained quite a traction on social media because the rivalry between the world’s leading artificial intelligence firms have always been in the open

Amodei and Altman share a complicated history. Amodei previously worked at OpenAI before leaving to co-found Anthropic with his sister, citing differences over the company's direction and approach to AI development.

"I was sort of confused," Amodei said in the course of the interview.

As the podcast progressed, Chang questioned whether the apparent tension between Amodei and Altman could undermine public trust in the AI industry, to which Amodei replied, “"What I think needs to happen is that the trustworthy actors need to get together and put the untrustworthy actors in a position where they kind of have to adopt the same standards."

Citing his indifference with Altman, Amodei said, “At the end of the day, why argue with someone when you don't have the same vision and you don't trust them?"