 "Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) takes a group photo with AI company leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (C) and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (R) at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026. AFP")
The heated rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic is making waves once again. Visuals of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei avoiding holding hands during a group photograph at the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday (February 19) have become a topic of discussion on social media.
There is a long-standing rivalry between the two AI companies, which keeps spilling out in the open. This is the second incident in a month when the dispute between the AI industry’s two most influential voices has grabbed eyeballs.
Let’s take a closer look.
Altman vs Amodei at India AI summit
A group photograph including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and global tech leaders at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 has gone viral. But not for the powerful message it sends.
On the stage, PM Modi held the hands of the two CEOs standing on either side of him — Google CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
All other leaders also linked arms with those beside them for the ceremonial shot.
However, Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s refusal to hold hands for the picture has triggered online chatter. The duo can be seen raising their fists in the air instead of joining hands.
The awkwardness was palpable and soon put the focus on their long-standing dispute.
How it all started
The two AI leaders were not always on bad terms. In fact, Amodei worked under Altman at OpenAI as vice president of research. He left the company in 2020 over disagreements about the company’s approach to safety and Altman’s leadership style.
Amodei, his sister, Daniela, and other former OpenAI employees went on to launch Anthropic the following year.
The rift over research direction and model capabilities has now turned into a public bickering about trust, safety, and AI’s use in everyday work and decision-making.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have emerged as top AI leaders, albeit in different market segments. As the companies’ valuation ballooned over the years, so has their rivalry.
OpenAI is valued at nearly $500 billion, with over 800 million (80 crore) users globally. It relies on consumers for more than 60 per cent of its revenue, as per Observer.
Anthropic is valued at $350 billion and attracts 85 per cent of its revenue from enterprise clients, reported CNBC.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI recently released new flagship models — Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex, respectively. Altman’s company has also introduced Frontier, a platform that enables businesses to create and deploy AI agents as digital co-workers. It is likely to compete with Claude Code.
How OpenAI-Anthropic rivalry has grown
Earlier, OpenAI refrained from naming Anthropic directly. Amodei’s company also promoted its own principles rather than flagging the alleged shortcomings of its competitors.
All this has changed now.
In May 2025, Anthropic posted billboards around San Francisco that read, “AI that you can trust” and “The one without all the drama,” which many viewed as an implicit reference to the abortive boardroom coup against Altman at OpenAI in November 2023.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei also took jibes at its rivals’ “code red” moments, without naming Google or OpenAI, in December 2025.
“We have a little bit of a privileged position where we can just keep growing and just keep developing our models,” he said, adding that Anthropic has issued no “code reds.”
His remarks came after Altman declared a “code red” at OpenAI following Google’s release of Gemini 3.
Google had earlier announced its own “code red” when ChatGPT launched in November 2022.
Earlier this month, Altman publicly rebuked Amodei’s company after Anthropic launched a multi-million-dollar Super Bowl campaign.
The satiric ads had the headlines “Deception,” “Betrayal,” “Treachery,” and “Violation,” with the tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
While the ads did not directly mention OpenAI, they were clearly digs at Altman’s company’s plans to sell ads inside ChatGPT. The campaign pointed out that Anthropic has decided to keep its Claude chatbot ad-free.
OpenAI is testing ads inside ChatGPT for free-tier and lower-cost users in the United States. The company has stressed that ads would be “clearly labelled,” appearing at the bottom of answers and steering clear of sensitive topics like health or politics, while never influencing the model’s responses.
OpenAI aired its own Super Bowl ad that showcased its Codex tool, focusing on “builders”— encouraging the idea that anyone can build with AI.
Acknowledging that the Anthropic ads “are funny, and I laughed,” Altman called the campaign “clearly dishonest”, clarifying that the “most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid, and we know our users would reject that.”
In a long post on X, he wrote that everyone deserves to use AI and OpenAI is committed to free access. He added, “Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do.”
Altman continued his tirade and alleged that “Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don’t like from using their coding product [including us]…”
The flare-up over Super Bowl ads snowballed into misinformation, including fabricated stories claiming last-minute changes to OpenAI’s own ad. The trolling was such that OpenAI leaders publicly called some viral posts “fake news.”
Daniel Steigman, a member of the OpenAI Codex staff, wrote on X: “I much prefer OpenAI’s positive outlook on AI over Anthropic’s negative one during the Super Bowl ads. Almost like we believe in the brighter future we are building.”
Reposting Steigman’s post, OpenAI president Greg Brockman wrote, “A fundamental difference in our respective outlooks on AI.”
Anthropic president Daniela Amodei said on Good Morning America that the ad was not intended to be about OpenAI or “any other company other than us.”
As both well-funded AI giants intensify their messaging, the stakes will only become higher. The OpenAI–Anthropic rivalry does not seem to die down anytime soon.
With inputs from agencies