An incident happened on Thursday (February 19, 2026) at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, which caught everyone’s attention. When the big businessmen of the country and abroad held each other’s hands and raised them in solidarity with Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a photo on the stage, the two businessmen standing together looked a bit uncomfortable. Both of them did not hold each other’s hands and made fists. This incident was captured on camera. During this time, Prime Minister Modi was also looking at both of them.
Both these businessmen are owners of big AI companies and they are competitive companies. During the program, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood on the stage with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Scale AI founder Alexander Wang, Meta Chief AI Officer and big global leaders in the technology sector. PM Modi was in the center and these people were on both sides of him.
While posing for a group photo after Prime Minister Modi’s address at the summit, all the leaders showed unity by holding each other’s hands and raising them in the air. Among these leaders, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei were standing together. When everyone was holding each other’s hands, these two did not hold each other’s hands and just lifted them in the air.
PM Modi raised the hands of Pichai and Altman standing next to him and urged other participants to do the same. However, Altman and Amodei, standing next to each other, raised fists instead of shaking hands, preventing the series from being completed. At this time both the veterans were seen a little uneasy.
Altman has been the CEO of American AI research organization OpenAI since 2019 and it was under his leadership that the popular AI tool ChatGPT was introduced. Amodei is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, an AI company famous for its cloud models.
By the way, Altman and Amodei have previously worked together in the same company. In 2020, Amodei, along with his sister Daniela Amodei and some other senior researchers, separated from OpenAI and founded Anthropic.
