India Summit shifts AI safety concerns from ethics to law

Artificial intelligence (AI) was bound to dominate the India AI Impact Summit 2026. That, in itself, is no longer news. What stood out, however, was a quieter, closed-door strategic briefing on Day 2 that shifted the conversation from scale and speed to safeguards and structure.

In a week filled with announcements on models, compute and deployment, AI Safety Connect (AISC) introduced a sharper question: as systems become more powerful and economically embedded, who is building the safety architecture to match them?

Bringing together policymakers, researchers and governance experts, the session argued that safety must scale as rapidly as capability. “We talk about AI constantly,” the panel observed. “But what does not receive equal attention is AI safety, what it means, why it matters, and who is working on it.”

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India’s Role in AI Governance

Nicolas Miailhe, Co-Founder of AI Safety Connect, framed the summit as a pivotal moment not only for India, but for the Global South.

India, he suggested, sits at the intersection of two urgent realities. The first is immediate harm: misinformation, synthetic content, risks to children, labour displacement and algorithmic opacity in systems already deployed at scale. The second is frontier risk: the accelerating race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) and, potentially, superintelligent systems.

Unlike earlier AI gatherings that leaned heavily towards catastrophic, “end-of-the-world” narratives, this briefing attempted to hold both ends of the spectrum together—today’s disruptions and tomorrow’s high-stakes capability thresholds.

“India cannot afford to ignore the race to superintelligence,” Miailhe noted, while emphasising that governance frameworks must protect workers, families, democratic institutions and vulnerable communities in the present.

With India chairing BRICS this year and hosting what is being described as the first major Global South-led AI summit, the diplomatic context added weight. The debate, as speakers framed it, is not whether innovation should proceed, but how it should be governed responsibly.

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Balancing Regulation and Innovation

A recurring theme was the claim that regulation inevitably slows innovation. The panel pushed back.

Miailhe cited India’s recent measures on synthetic content as an example of anticipatory governance, aimed at protecting information integrity even as AI systems expand. The argument was that guardrails and growth need not be mutually exclusive.

Speakers also highlighted a structural shift within the industry. What began as a startup-driven wave is now operating at an industrial scale, with frontier laboratories generating tens of billions in revenue. With that scale, they argued, comes systemic responsibility.

The conversation, in their view, is moving from an “innovation economy” to an “AI industrial economy”. Historically, industrial revolutions have required standards, inspections, compliance systems and cross-border coordination. Advanced AI, they suggested, will be no different.

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From Principles to Verifiable Systems

AI Safety Connect stressed that the next phase of governance cannot rely on ethics statements alone. The emphasis is shifting to instruments that can be tested, compared and enforced.

These include testing and evaluation standards, certification regimes, verification technologies and cross-border governance mechanisms. The concern is practical. Billions of people now interact daily with increasingly opaque “black box” systems. In such an environment, safety cannot remain a voluntary commitment; it must become an enforceable framework.

Importantly, safety was framed not merely as a constraint, but as an opportunity. Verification technologies, auditing frameworks and safety engineering may become growth sectors in their own right. Countries that invest early in these capabilities could help shape global standards rather than simply adopt them.

A Global South Stake in AI

The session also challenged the notion that middle powers and Global South nations are destined to remain spectators in a US–China frontier AI race.

Through coalition diplomacy, procurement leverage and standards-setting, they can influence both the pace and direction of AI development. The broader ambition of the summit, in this telling, is to ensure that advanced AI governance is not written solely by the laboratories building frontier models, but shaped by a wider coalition of states and stakeholders before critical capability thresholds are crossed.

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Putting Safety Before Crisis

AI Safety Connect’s mission is to build a coordination infrastructure before advanced systems reach destabilising thresholds. As AI becomes more powerful, more embedded and more economically central, safety is shifting from the margins of policy debate to the core of geopolitical strategy.

At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, amid expansive discussions about scale, ambition, and national positioning, the safety briefing repeatedly returned to one idea: the trajectory of artificial intelligence will not be determined by innovation alone. It will be defined by how seriously governments, industry and civil society institutionalise safety now, before crisis forces their hand.

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