India AI Summit: Who Is Dario Amodei, US CEO Who Refused To Hold Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s Hand On Stage?

New Delhi: An awkward moment unfolded on stage at the India AI Summit on Thursday morning when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who head rival AI firms, declined to hold hands for a group photograph with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Bharat Mandapam.

Instead of holding hands, Altman and Amodei raised their fists during the photograph. The awkward moment between the former colleagues, now rival CEOs, was captured on camera and quickly went viral.

The tech leaders, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, had gathered on stage following Modi’s address at the summit.

Who Is Dario Amodei?

Dario Amodei was born in San Francisco in 1983. His father, Riccardo Amodei, was an Italian-American leather craftsman, while his mother, Elena Engel, worked as a project manager for libraries.

Amodei is an American artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. He spent more than four years at OpenAI before leaving the company to launch Anthropic.

Before joining OpenAI, he worked at Google Brain as a Senior Research Scientist (until July 2016) and previously served as a Research Scientist at Baidu. Amodei earned his doctorate in biophysics from Princeton University as a Hertz Fellow and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Stanford University in 2006.