When Tech Billionaires Refused to Hold Hands: The Delhi Summit’s Defining Moment

The image was meant to project unity. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood at the centre of a line of 13 tech executives — leaders from Google, Meta, Microsoft and others — their clasped hands raised in a gesture of collective ambition. But two people declined to join: Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic, rivals whose companies represent two of the most powerful AI systems in existence. It was, in miniature, a perfect symbol of a summit defined by competing visions.
Emmanuel Macron’s speech provided a different kind of symbolism. The French president stood apart from the tech executives not by refusing to hold hands but by insisting that the hands-clasped unity of the industry does not extend to the kind of accountability that democratic societies require. He focused on child safety — specifically on research showing that 1.2 million children in 11 countries had been victimised by AI deepfakes in a single year — and argued that this is a failure not of technology but of governance.
Macron was also responding to the Trump administration’s AI adviser, who had renewed his criticism of the EU’s AI Act at the same summit. Macron’s reply was sharp: those dismissing European regulation are misinformed, and Europe’s record of investment and innovation disproves their argument. He did not concede the premise that safety and growth are in tension; he challenged it directly, arguing that safe environments are more durable than lawless ones.
The broader summit raised questions that went well beyond European-American regulatory disputes. António Guterres warned that AI power concentrated in a few hands is dangerous for global equity and democracy. Narendra Modi called for open-source AI development as an alternative to the current oligopoly. Sam Altman predicted a world where data centres would soon house more intellectual capacity than human minds — a prospect that makes the current governance vacuum feel urgent rather than abstract.
The summit ended without a binding agreement, but the political dynamics it revealed are important. The tech industry’s claim to be a self-regulating, self-correcting force for good is increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of documented harm. Macron’s insistence that governments step up, backed by Guterres and Modi, represents a meaningful challenge to that claim. The hands-not-clasped image of Altman and Amodei suggests that even within the industry, unity is more elusive than Modi’s photo opportunity implied.