Who is Dario Amodei, US CEO who refused to hold Sam Altman’s hand on AI summit stage?
An awkward moment occurred at the India AI Summit stage this morning when Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, CEOs of rival AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic, refused to hold hands for a group photograph. The incident has exploded on social media and set “Dario Amodei” trending on Google in India. (Also read: Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei avoid holding hands while on stage with PM Modi. Awkward moment goes viral)Dario Amodei (R) and Sam Altman (L) share the stage at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi on February 19, 2026 (AFP)Who is Dario Amodei?Dario Amodei is an American artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the large language model series Claude.Amodei has a contentious hory with OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman. He spent over four years at OpenAI before leaving the startup to launch Anthropic.While at OpenAI between 2016 to 2020, Amodei went from team lead of AI safety to Vice President of Research. He led the development of large language models like GPT-2 and GPT-3.Before joining OpenAI, he worked at Google Brain as a Senior Research Scient (until July 2016), and as a Research Scient at Baidu.Early life and educationDario Amodei earned his doctorate degree in biophysics from Princeton University as a Hertz Fellow, and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Stanford University in 2006, according to his LinkedIn profile.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.He has a younger ser Daniela, who also quit OpenAI in 2021 to launch Anthropic along with other senior members of OpenAI.Dario Amodei trends on GoogleOn Google, search queries for Dario Amodei rose sharply this morning after he refused to hold hands with Sam Altman for a picture.Google Trends data shows that in India, search interest in Amodei started rising around 9:46am. It continued to rise steadily after that. Related queries included “Sam and Dario”, “Sam Altman and Dario Amodei” and “Dario Amodei vs Sam Altman”.
