Industry Leaders Chart Frontier AI Safety Path at Delhi Summit

The evening programme at The Imperial Hotel brought together representatives from leading technology companies, financial institutions, and government to examine how the private sector can help shape frontier AI safety practices, norms, and standards, according to a release.

The event took place hours after India's Minister of Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, unveiled the New Delhi Frontier AI Commitments at the main Summit. AISC Co-Founder Cyrus Hodes welcomed the announcement but pressed for more.

"Commitments around data insights and multilingual evaluations, while important, do not yet address the hard questions -- how safety decisions are actually made at the frontier, how risks are assessed before deployment, and how we hold each other accountable when things go wrong," said Hodes. "We need more."

Telangana's government officials delivered opening remarks positioning India's states as active participants in building AI governance infrastructure. Shri Sanjay Kumar, Special Chief Secretary for Industry, Commerce, IT and Communications in Telangana, framed the challenge in direct terms.

"AI is something where everybody has to come together. Every country has to come to the same platform to discuss and debate because technology and AI don't understand any boundary," said Kumar. He outlined Telangana's data exchange platform, which anonymises public data to make it available to startups and researchers while preserving privacy.

Duddilla Sridhar Babu, Telangana's Minister for Information Technology, built on this with a broader ambition. "The Global South is not a place that is waiting for safety standards to be written elsewhere. We are writing them here, in real time, for 40 million people," said.

Minister Sridhar Babu. He announced that Telangana would serve as a regulatory co-builder alongside initiatives like AI Safety Connect.

The evening's first panel, Deciding at the Frontier, examined how advanced AI systems are increasingly deployed and tested in live environments at scale, with consequential safety judgements often shaped through internal decision-making alongside evolving regulatory expectations.

Senior leaders from ServiceNow, Mastercard, and Google DeepMind explored where current industry approaches are proving robust and where uncertainties persist, moderated by Amlan Mohanty of Carnegie India, according to the release.

The second panel, Governing Frontier AI for Secure Deployment, addressed the challenge of implementing safety practices across a patchwork of national standards, guidelines, and norms.

Representatives from Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, the Frontier Model Forum, and the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation examined where cross-border divergences are creating uncertainty and what practical forms of coordination could move beyond dialogue towards operational compatibility. The panel was moderated by Paul Triolo of DGA Group, according to the release.

In closing remarks, AISC Co-Founder Nicolas Miailhe identified the evening's central finding. "There is a gap between what we aspire to and what we can accomplish to implement standards of safety and trust for frontier AI. The good news is that the people working to close that gap, in coordination with multiple sectors and across borders, are in the room with us tonight."

Hodes echoed the sentiment, noting that the evening had reinforced a sense of shared purpose. "What struck us is that the will to take safety seriously is genuinely present in this room. That potential was present in both of our panels tonight, and it should be present in every conversation that follows this summit," he said.

The co-founders closed with three requests of industry participants: work toward shared language on safety within and across organisations; bring governments, including middle powers, into standard-setting as co-authors rather than consumers; and return to the next conversation with something concrete -- a commitment, a pilot, or a metric.

AISC's engagement at the India AI Impact Summit concludes today at 15:30 with International AI Safety Coordination: What Policymakers Need to Know, a ministerial-level panel at the Bharat Mandapam featuring OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann, Singapore Minister Josephine Teo, and Malaysia Minister Gobind Singh Deo.

- ANI