Altman and Amodei Refuse to Hold Hands at India AI Summit, Crystallizing the Industry's Deepest Rivalry

A viral moment at the India AI Impact Summit — OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei declining to clasp hands for a group photo — overshadowed substantive announcements including a massive Tata-OpenAI data center partnership.

The India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi produced a week's worth of headlines in a single day, but the image that dominated social media was the simplest: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei standing side by side for a group photo and conspicuously refusing to hold hands. As @business reported, the moment instantly went viral as a symbol of the personal and philosophical rift between the two leaders of frontier AI development.

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