The brewing cold war in the AI world was on full display at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Thursday (February 19), when AI leaders took the stage with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to sign a set of commitments to democratise the technology.
As they all joined hands and raised them in the air, two people shared an awkward moment: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, standing next to each other, contemplated for a few seconds whether they wanted to hold hands. In the end, they did not, and just raised their fists.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei visibly declined to hold hands during a group photo at the India AI Impact Summit, even as other leaders on stage linked arms for the ceremonial shot pic.twitter.com/J1eGShSkiK
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 19, 2026
Behind the moment is a history of what Amodei has previously called a “difference” in vision with Altman, as their companies — behind the popular AI assistants Claude and ChatGPT, respectively — have taken somewhat different paths in the AI race.
The OpenAI vs Anthropic rivalry
Before starting Anthropic in 2021, Amodei spent years working at OpenAI, where he served as its Vice President of Research, and also led the development of large language models like GPT-2 and GPT-3. As he experienced AI’s ability to scale exponentially, he began to feel that development of the technology had to be done more responsibly, with safety and security at its core.
In 2020, he left OpenAI over differences about the company’s approach to safety. He, along with his sister Daniela and a group of former OpenAI employees, started Anthropic a year later.
In a podcast in 2024, Amodei said that the real reason for leaving OpenAI was that “it is incredibly unproductive to try and argue with someone else’s vision.” This marked the beginning of a pronounced rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic, as people increasingly started associating the two companies with taking different paths in AI: the former with speed of development and commercialisation, and the latter with focusing more on safety and security.
The rivalry was on full display earlier this year, when Anthropic ran an advertisement campaign during the Super Bowl championship in the US, taking a dig at OpenAI’s then-recent announcement of introducing ads in ChatGPT.
One ad featured a young man in a park attempting pull-ups, who asks a muscular bystander about achieving six-pack abs. The man starts with a detailed, robotic response, like an AI chatbot, before spewing out an ad for “StepBoost Max” insoles. Anthropic ran another 60-second spot titled ‘How Can I Communicate Better With My Mother?’ in which a man asks that question, and a chatbot disguised as a therapist gives him advice before pivoting into pushing products instead. The ads concluded with the tagline “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
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In response to the ads, Altman said in a post on X, “First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our 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”.
“More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don’t show you ads.)” he added.
A small circle
The connections between the two companies are not unique. As The Indian Express recently explained, the world’s most consequential artificial intelligence research is being conducted by a strikingly small circle of scientists who studied mostly under the same mentors, taught in the same rooms and kept recruiting from each other’s labs.
After the e-commerce website eBay acquired the fintech company PayPal in 2002, a close-knit group of former PayPal founders and employees — that included Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman — went on to found or fund many of Silicon Valley’s most influential companies. Their ventures include YouTube, LinkedIn, Tesla, Yelp, SpaceX and Palantir.
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OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk (who later left the board), Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman. Thiel was the main backer and mentor of Altman, providing a large part of the $5 million that made up Altman’s initial venture fund. When OpenAI launched in 2015, Thiel was one of the founding investors pledging $1 billion.
The most notable startups founded by OpenAI alumni include the San Francisco-based Anthropic. It has rapidly grown to become OpenAI’s biggest rival.
Additionally, the themes central to the divide between the companies have also appeared within OpenAI in the recent past. Its co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, left OpenAI in May 2024 after he was reportedly part of a failed 2023 coup to replace Altman, stemming from concerns about safety in the development of AI. However, OpenAI employees rallied behind Altman, leading to his reinstatement.
Shortly afterwards, Sutskever co-founded Safe Superintelligence. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, left OpenAI last year to found Thinking Machines Lab, which emerged in February 2025. Aravind Srinivas worked as a research scientist at OpenAI for a year until 2022, when he left the company to co-found AI search engine Perplexity.
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Google DeepMind is a major “founder factory” in the AI industry, with over 200 former employees having gone on to establish their own startups, with OpenAI coming in a close second. Its co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is now CEO of Microsoft AI.
