Fordel StudiosAltman and Amodei share a moment of awkwardness at India’s big AI summit
What Happened
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi prompted speakers at the event to join hands and raise them in a show of unity, all executives onstage obliged, except OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, who held their hands conspicuously apart.
Our Take
Look, two CEOs keeping their hands down while everyone else does the unity salute—that's either a calculated power move or a spectacular optics failure. Probably both. You don't accidentally keep your hands apart on a stage that large in front of Modi. Either they're signaling independence (risky) or they got briefed wrong and froze (embarrassing). Either way, it's theater. The real play is India wanting AI compute resources from both camps, so they show up anyway despite the awkward photo op.
What To Do
Watch who Anthropic hires in India over the next 6 months—that'll tell you if this was damage control or genuine cooling.
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