It lasted only seconds, yet it spoke volumes. At the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday, February 19, 2026, in New Delhi, a single awkward pause between two men revealed what the tech world had quietly known for years. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei stood side by side as leaders joined hands with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But when the moment came, they did not.
Instead of joining hands with the others, Altman and Amodei raised their fists in silence, creating a visible moment of tension on stage.
In a field driven by code and innovation, it was a deeply human moment.
A Moment Years in the Making
This hesitation was not due to anything coincidental; it was simply the difference of opinion between people coming from differing ideologies as opposed to egos.
Amodei was one of the key members of OpenAI before Anthropic was founded. Between GPT-2 and GPT-3, he was instrumental in achieving many of those advancements. But as artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved over the past few years, Dario Amodei has become less comfortable with its explosive growth.
Dario Amodei left OpenAI in 2020 due to differences over safety priorities. In 2021, he co-founded Anthropic with a group of former OpenAI employees, including his sister Daniela Amodei. The rift has only continued to widen since this time. OpenAI has been pushing large-scale applicability and use by everyone, whereas Anthropic is focused on safety and responsible development. These two visions exist in the same space – the artificial intelligence industry.
Competing Futures of AI
There has been a subtle and public rift emerging between the two as they moved their companies forward since the beginning of earlier this year when Anthropic aired an audacious advertisement during Super Bowl commercials that criticised the notion of advertising within AI assistants, showing they want AI systems to have a guiding effect, not manipulate you. In response to this advertisement, Altman made a very calm response back and stated forcefully that OpenAI’s position was that of being an open platform that is relatively massive in scale with billions of users actively shaping AI currently and going forward rather than ideals alone.
The two have had philosophical differences rather than personal differences, but as the two have moved along, they have developed an ever-growing amount of tension towards one another.
A Small Circle, Big Consequences
It’s ironic that some of our strongest AI competitors share similar roots. Just like the PayPal alumni helped create Silicon Valley, many of the current leaders of AI technology came out of overlapping labs and research groups as well.
OpenAI itself has also experienced internal divisions and fractures. With the high-profile departures of prominent researchers and others involved with AI as well as the development of companies that broke off from OpenAI (also called start-ups), this also creates a more fundamental question that the industry faces: How fast is too fast?
Amodei represents caution where Altman represents speed. Neither position is completely correct nor incorrect.
Why That Silent Gesture Matters
The handshake that did not happen is a powerful symbol during a time when the claims made at AI conferences about collaboration abound. There was nothing dramatic about the lack of the handshake; there was nothing personal about the lack of the handshake; there was only honesty between two men who are at the top of their fields trying to define their industries’ futures using different criteria as guidelines.
This lack of a handshake demonstrated that AI will not only be defined by technology but also by moral dilemmas that are being worked through in the present moment. AI will ultimately be shaped as much by safety/speed, control/access, and reliability/progress/innovation as it will be by technology.
Sometimes the most profound statements come without any words at all.
Two titans of industry exhibited to the world their unwillingness to join hands; how mankind will interact with and use AI in the future will be influenced by what happens next.
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