Altman and Amodei share a moment of awkwardness at India’s big AI summit
Source: TechCrunch
In Brief
Image Credits: Ludovic MARIN / AFP / Getty Images
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi prompted speakers at the India AI Impact Summit to join hands in a show of solidarity, every executive on stage obliged—except OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who kept their hands noticeably apart.
A growing rivalry
Altman and Amodei lead the two foremost labs in the AI race, and their competition has intensified recently:
- After OpenAI announced plans to introduce advertisements to ChatGPT, Anthropic ran a pair of Super Bowl ads mocking the idea, declaring it would never place ads in Claude.
- Altman responded, calling Anthropic “dishonest” and “authoritarian.” He wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “We would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid, and we know our users would reject that.”【source】(https://twitter.com/sama/status/2019139174339928189)
Announcements from the summit
Both companies used the New Delhi event to unveil new initiatives in India:
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OpenAI announced the opening of two new offices in the country, a partnership with IT giant TCS, and the deployment of tools aimed at higher‑education institutions.
- Partnership details: OpenAI taps Tata for 100 MW AI data‑center capacity in India, eyes 1 GW
- Education rollout: OpenAI pushes into higher education as India seeks to scale AI skills
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Anthropic also opened an Indian office and announced a collaboration with Infosys to deploy its AI tools both internally and for external customers.
- Partnership details: Infosys partners with Anthropic to build enterprise‑grade AI agents
The summit highlighted a surge of AI‑related investments, product announcements, and strategic partnerships across the Indian tech ecosystem.