Did India's AI Summit Get Safety Right? AI Summit Special

In this episode of Interpreting India, Nidhi Singh, Associate Fellow at Carnegie India, speaks with Professor Balaraman Ravindran, Head of the Department of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras, and Co-Chair of the Safe and Trusted AI Working Group at the India AI Impact Summit. Since the summit, Professor Ravindran has also been appointed to the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. There is a narrative that has taken hold since the summit, that India moved away from safety and left frontier risks behind. This conversation sets the record straight. This episode explores: What did the Safe and Trusted AI Working Group actually deliver, and what are the Trusted AI Commons? and the AI governance guidance note designed to do? Was the India AI Impact Summit really less focused on safety, or did the conversation simply evolve when it moved to the Global South? How quickly is the frontier risk landscape changing, and are the frameworks we are building keeping pace? What does the growing concentration of the most capable AI models in the hands of two countries mean for a country like India?