The tension in the AI world was quietly visible on stage in New Delhi on February 19, and despite Sam Altman dismissing the moment as “mere confusion,” the internet isn’t buying the polite excuse. Hours after a video of an awkward, failed hand-holding session at the 2026 India AI Impact Summit went viral, the ChatGPTapp account responded with a surreal, captionless edit that suggested the awkwardness was anything but accidental.
The image shows PM Narendra Modi raising his arm as Sam Altman stands next to him, sporting giant, glowing red lobster claws instead of hands. Altman’s lobster claws appeared tightly closed on the side facing PM Modi, but open and slightly extended on the side facing Amodei.
The post only fueled speculation that Altman may have hesitated to hold hands with Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who was standing on his other side. While most leaders linked hands and raised them in the air, the two raised their hands separately.
— ChatGPT (@ChatGPTapp) February 19, 2026
The viral moment that started it all
During the event, PM Modi tried to create a symbolic “unity chain” on stage. He reached for the hands of the tech leaders standing beside him. Sundar Pichai on one side and Sam Altman on the other, and signalled for everyone to raise their joined hands together. Almost everyone followed along. But two men standing next to each other in the middle did not— Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic. Instead, both raised clenched fists and stared straight ahead.
Within minutes, the clip exploded online. Headlines called it an “AI Cold War on Stage.” Others described it as a “symbolic snub” at Modi’s summit.
Later, Sam Altman spoke to reporters, including Moneycontrol, to explain what happened. “I didn’t know what was happening. I was sort of confused… Modi grabbed my hand and put it up, and I just wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be doing.” When someone joked, “I think it was an open claw,” Altman laughed it off.
Did ChatGPT just reveal the ‘Open Claw’ secret?
Netizens observed that Altman seemed to slightly reach toward Amodei at one point, but the gesture was not returned. Others observed that the two maintained noticeable physical distance and avoided eye contact for several seconds. The lobster claws may have been funny. But they may not have been meaningless. In internet culture, claws and lobsters are often used as symbols. Claws “pinch.” They grab. They defend. They don’t shake hands.
“You cannot hold hands if you have claws,” one person commented. “Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s OpenClaw,” another commented. “If hand-holding is a symbol of cooperation, then claws are a symbol of competition,” a third added.
The AI cold war subtext
Altman and Amodei are not strangers. Dario Amodei once worked at OpenAI. Before founding Anthropic in 2021, he served as OpenAI’s Vice President of Research and led the development of major large language models like GPT-2 and GPT-3.
In 2020, he left OpenAI over differences in approach. A year later, along with his sister Daniela Amodei and a group of former OpenAI employees, he started Anthropic. In a 2024 podcast, Amodei explained his departure saying the real reason for leaving was that “it is incredibly unproductive to try and argue with someone else’s vision.”
The rivarly became very public earlier this year during the Super Bowl in the United States. Anthropic ran advertisements that took direct aim at OpenAI’s reported plans to introduce ads into ChatGPT.
On the other hand, much of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence research is being done by a relatively small circle of scientists. Many studied under the same mentors, worked in the same labs, and later recruited from each other’s teams.
The tech world has seen similar patterns before. After eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, a tight-knit group of former PayPal founders and employees, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman, went on to start or fund companies such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Tesla, Yelp, SpaceX and Palantir. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees, has since grown into OpenAI’s biggest rival.
Where Claude stands against OpenAI’s ChatGPT
ChatGPT now has around 800 to 900 million weekly active users. It leads the consumer market by a wide margin. Anthropic’s Claude looks very different in comparison. Its consumer base is much smaller, with roughly 20 million monthly users. But in the corporate world, the story changes. Anthropic now holds about 32 percent of the enterprise AI market. That puts it ahead of OpenAI, which holds about 25 percent in that space.
Financially, the two companies are closer than before. OpenAI is valued at around $500 billion. However, it is spending heavily, roughly $17 billion a year on compute costs. The company is reportedly aiming for a potential $1 trillion IPO by 2027. To help offset expenses, it has begun testing ads on its free tiers.
Anthropic recently reached a $380 billion valuation after raising $30 billion in February 2026. Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic is projected to reach break-even by 2028. That forecast is largely comes from its enterprise strategy. Its contracts with business clients are high-margin, averaging around $46,000 per company.