A remark made by Dario Amodei, chief executive officer and co-founder of Anthropic, on the India AI Summit held earlier this year in February, has gone viral on social media and has triggered a political row. In an interview with Bloomberg, Amodei said the summit, which was held in New Delhi and witnessed attendance by over 100 AI leaders, CEOs and CXOs, was “extremely disorganised.”
The Anthropic CEO’s response was to question on the awkward moment between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and him on the stage, wherein both avoided holding hands like the rest of the tech leaders. Notably, Amodei had previously worked as vice president of research at OpenAI, but left the company along with his sister and other senior researchers to found his own company, Anthropic.
Amodei’s remark on the moment, however, has now been pointed out by the Congress, with party leader Abhishek Singhvi claiming the summit was for “Artificial Image Management”. “Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated in a Bloomberg interview that the India AI Summit was “extremely disorganised,”” Amitabh Dubey, research and monitoring in-charge at the All India Congress Committee, said while sharing a post on X.
The BJP retorted, saying the clip had been “edited” and left out the portion where Amodei clarified that this is the nature of AI summits around the world.
What did Amodei say?
In the interview with Bloomberg, Amodei was asked “what happened” during the moment when Altman and him refused to hold hands on stage. To this, the Anthropic CEO said, “What happened was that the summit was extremely disorganised. We all came up at the last minute and they changed the order in which we were standing. And then they took a picture of us and they ordered us all to hold hands,” Amodei said.
However, he added, “If you’ve ever been to one of these summits, and I’m not saying anything bad about India in particular, but all of these kind of international type summits that have heads of state are super disorganised.”
Cong points to Amodei remark, BJP slams ‘edited clip’
After the clip with Amodei’s remarks was posted by Congress’s research and monitoring in-charge, party MP Abhishek Singhvi criticised the AI summit, referring to it as a “PR exercise.” “India was supposed to showcase its Artificial Intelligence leadership. Instead, the world got a glimpse of Artificial Image Management and real event mismanagement. The Government’s PR engine may be running at full speed, but the governance software seems to be crashing far too often,” Singh said in a post on X.
The BJP retorted, saying the Congress had “conveniently omitted” the Anthropic CEO’s clarification that he was not singling out India in his criticism.
“The India-loathing Congress ecosystem is circulating an edited clip to malign the hugely successful AI Summit held in Delhi,” Amit Malviya, in-charge of BJP’s information and technology department, said while replying to Congress’s post on X. Malviya accused the Opposition party of trying to “run down India’s achievements”.
“… An edited video, stripped of clarification, is enough for them to manufacture outrage and score political points,” Malviya said, adding that the summit had brought together global leaders, policy makers and industry experts.
“That is what the world saw. Only the Congress ecosystem saw an opportunity to demean India. They won’t get it. For them, every Indian success is a problem to be explained away, diminished, or discredited,” Malviya alleged.
