AI Safety Connect At India AI Impact Summit: From Principles To Power In Policy

 Artificial intelligence dominated conversations this week. But inside a closed-door strategic briefing during the India AI Impact Summit 2026, one point landed with unusual clarity:

AI Safety Connect (AISC) brought together policymakers, researchers, and governance experts with a simple argument: as the race toward advanced AI speeds up, safety mechanisms must scale just as fast, if not faster.

“We talk about AI constantly,” the panel opened. “But what doesn’t receive equal attention is AI safety, what it means, why it matters, and who is working on it.”

India’s Moment In Global AI Governance

Nicolas Miailhe, Co-Founder of AI Safety Connect, positioned the summit as a turning point, not only for India, but for the Global South.

Clearly, India sits at the intersection of two urgent realities:

Immediate harms from AI systems already deployed at scale, misinformation, synthetic content, risks to children, and labour displacement.
Frontier risks from the accelerating race toward AGI and potentially superintelligent systems.

Unlike earlier AI summits that leaned heavily toward catastrophic, “end-of-the-world” scenarios, this gathering tried to hold both ends of the spectrum in the same room: today’s real-world disruptions and tomorrow’s high-stakes frontier risks.

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

As Chair of BRICS this year, and host of what is being described as the first major Global South-led AI summit, India’s diplomatic positioning added weight to the discussion. The question, as speakers put it, is not whether innovation should continue, but how it should be governed responsibly.

Regulation Versus Innovation - How to Navigate?

A strong theme through the briefing was pushing back on a familiar claim: that regulation inevitably slows innovation. Miailhe pointed to recent Indian measures on synthetic content regulation as an example of proactive governance, an attempt to protect information integrity even as AI systems scale.

Speakers also touched on a broader shift in the industry itself. What once felt like a startup-led wave is now operating at industrial scale, with frontier labs generating tens of billions in revenue. With that scale, they argued, comes structural responsibility.

The conversation is moving from an “innovation economy” to what was described as a new “AI industrial economy”. And historically, industrial revolutions have demanded standards, inspections, compliance systems, and coordination across borders.

From Principles To Verification

AI Safety Connect stressed that the next phase cannot be built on ethics statements alone. The emphasis was on tools that can actually be used, compared, and enforced:

It cuts across, Testing and evaluation standards, Certification regimes Verification technologies, Cross-border governance mechanisms.

The concern is practical: billions of people now interact daily with increasingly opaque “black box” systems. In that world, safety cannot remain a voluntary promise. It has to become something closer to an enforceable structure.

Importantly, the panel also framed safety as more than a constraint. It can be an economic opportunity. Verification technologies, auditing frameworks, and safety engineering could become growth sectors in their own right. And countries that build these capabilities early may have a real say in shaping global standards.

A Global South Voice In A Frontier Race

One of the sharper undercurrents in the room was about agency. Speakers argued that middle powers and Global South nations do not have to be passive spectators in a US-China frontier AI race. Through coalition diplomacy, procurement leverage, and standards-setting, they can influence the pace and direction of development.

The summit’s bigger ambition, in this telling, is to ensure advanced AI governance is not written only by the laboratories building frontier models, but shaped by a wider set of global interests before systems cross critical capability thresholds.

Safety Before Crisis

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

At India AI Impact Summit 2026, amid wider conversations about scale and ambition, AI Safety Connect kept coming back to one core idea: The future of artificial intelligence will not be shaped by innovation alone. It will be shaped by how seriously the world takes safety now.