'Awkward': Sam Altman refuses to hold Anthropic CEO's hand at India AI Impact Summit; video goes viral

The ongoing India AI Impact Summit has made the headlines for both good and bad reasons. Now, we can add awkward to the list.

While yesterday the nation faced global embarrassment over the Galgotias University robodog row, today we saw a real-time rivalry unfold between CEOs of two of the biggest artificial intelligence companies.

In a video which is now going viral, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, refused to hold hands on stage where a dozen other individuals including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were present.

PM Modi wanted the moment to be show of strength with the leaders standing hand-in-hand. but instead, we got a show of open animosity between the AI moguls. Both individuals were just standing next to each other with one of their fists up smiling awkwardly.

Internet users were quick to point out the incident and the fact that Amodei used to be an OpenAI employee.

Altman's behaviour comes on the heels of Anthropic getting an incredible popularity boost after it was revealed that the US government used its Claude AI assistant to devise a plan for Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro's "kidnapping."

Altman is not the sole competitor trying to outrun Anthropic. World's richest man Elon Musk, who owns his own company Xai and co-founded OpenAI with Altman, has lashed out against Anthropic. Last week, he stated that Anthropic's model is "misanthropic and evil" after the company raised $30 billion in funding.