A moment intended to showcase unified support for global tech innovation at the ongoing India AI Impact Summit turned unexpectedly awkward. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited speakers on stage to join hands and raise them in a gesture of solidarity, every executive complied—except for OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who kept their hands visibly apart.

As heads of the two leading labs in the artificial intelligence field, Altman and Amodei are known to be intense rivals. Their competition has grown even more heated in recent months. After OpenAI announced plans to introduce advertisements to ChatGPT, Anthropic took a public jab at its competitor with a series of Super Bowl ads, emphasizing that its own Claude assistant would never feature ads. Altman quickly fired back, labeling Anthropic as “dishonest” and “authoritarian.”

“We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid, and we know our users would reject that,” he stated at the time. Both Altman and Amodei were in India this week attending the AI summit in New Delhi, where a series of AI-related investments, features, and product announcements were unveiled.

OpenAI revealed it is establishing two new offices in India, partnering with the IT giant TCS, and rolling out tools tailored for higher education. Similarly, Anthropic has opened an office in the country and has entered into a collaboration with Infosys to support both internal and external deployment of its AI tools.