India, Feb. 17 -- 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 r...