The Handshake That Wasn’t: Inside OpenAI and Anthropic’s Escalating Rivalry

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached for Sam Altman’s hand on stage at the India AI Impact Summit, the OpenAI CEO complied—but what happened next spoke volumes. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Altman raised his fist in the air while Amodei did the same. The two men, once colleagues and now bitter rivals, did not touch. They did not make eye contact. The body language was impossible to miss.

“I was confused, like Modi grabbed my hand and put it up and I just wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be doing.” — Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

From the Same Lab to Opposite Corners

The tension on that New Delhi stage was years in the making. Amodei spent four years at OpenAI from 2016 to 2020, rising to vice president of research. He played an instrumental role in launching GPT-2 and GPT-3, and co-invented the reinforcement learning from human feedback technique that underpins modern chatbots. By all measures, he was a core architect of the technology that would make OpenAI a household name.

But Amodei grew concerned about OpenAI’s direction—specifically, what he perceived as insufficient attention to safety as the company raced to scale ChatGPT. In 2021, he left, taking his sister Daniela and roughly a dozen OpenAI employees with him. They founded Anthropic with a mission to build AI that prioritized safety above all else.

The philosophical split was fundamental. Amodei believed that while scaling up large language models would yield almost unlimited advances, those advances needed to be matched with robust guardrails. OpenAI, in his view, was moving too fast on deployment and too slow on safety.

“There were a set of people who believed in those two ideas. We really trusted each other and wanted to work together. And so we went off and started our own company with that idea in mind.” — Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO

The Super Bowl Salvo

The rivalry remained largely below the surface until this month, when Anthropic launched a four-ad Super Bowl campaign that took direct aim at OpenAI. Titled “A Time and a Place,” the commercials opened with provocative words splashed across the screen: “betrayal,” “deception,” “treachery,” and “violation.”

Each ad showed ordinary people seeking help from an AI assistant, only to have their conversations interrupted by unwanted advertisements. The message was unmistakable: OpenAI was planning to put ads in ChatGPT, and Anthropic wanted the world to know that Claude would remain ad-free.

The tagline landed like a punch: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

Altman responded within hours, posting a lengthy thread on X. He called the ads “clearly dishonest” and accused Anthropic of “doublespeak.” He defended OpenAI’s plan to offer free access to billions of people who cannot afford subscriptions, arguing that Anthropic’s approach—serving an expensive product to wealthy users—was the real elitist position.

Marketing experts saw it differently. Australian marketing journalist Mark Ritson called it “the first piece of effective brand strategy the AI category has produced.” NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway was even more pointed: “When you’re the market leader, you don’t reference the competition.” Altman’s lengthy response, Galloway suggested, only proved Anthropic had gotten under his skin.

A 80 Billion Grudge Match

The awkward photo op in New Delhi came less than two weeks after the Super Bowl clash, and the timing was notable. Just days earlier, Anthropic had closed a 0 billion funding round that valued the company at 80 billion—making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

The company has grown from a dozen employees at its founding to more than 2,500 today. Backers include Google, Salesforce, and Amazon. Anthropic has evolved from a safety-focused research lab into a formidable commercial competitor to OpenAI.

The rivalry has taken on personal dimensions as well. When Altman was abruptly fired from OpenAI in November 2023, the board reportedly approached Amodei about replacing him—and even floated merging the two companies. Amodei declined both offers, choosing to remain independent and continue building Anthropic as a counterweight to OpenAI’s dominance.

What Comes Next

The AI industry is watching this rivalry with intense interest. Unlike the platform wars of the past—Windows versus Mac, iPhone versus Android—this competition is playing out in real time, with both companies releasing new capabilities weekly and taking public shots at each other’s strategies.

The stakes extend beyond market share. Both companies are racing to develop artificial general intelligence, and their differing philosophies—OpenAI’s move-fast approach versus Anthropic’s safety-first stance—could shape how that technology is deployed and governed.

For now, the rivalry remains a war of words and advertising campaigns. But as both companies push toward increasingly powerful AI systems, the competition is only intensifying. The handshake that never happened in New Delhi may become the defining image of this era—two men who once built together, now standing apart, each convinced the other is steering toward a cliff.

This article was reported by the ArtificialDaily editorial team. For more information, visit Fortune and CNBC.