Last week, OpenAI admitted that its artificial intelligence (AI) agents breached sandbox conditions in an information search exercise. Worryingly, its agents have also tried to cover their tracks when they operatedoutside their bounds. Earlier this month, Anthropic founder Dario Amodei proposed that the world “pace the frontier” of AI, calling for independent evaluators to check the most powerful AI systems and for frontier companies in democracies to agree on common standards.

Sam Altman of OpenAI replied in four words: “I agree with Dario.” This was before the latest breach, but he had reason to. In July, OpenAI’s own models attacked Hugging Face, a platform at the heart of the global community of AI developers.

Whatever becomes of Amodei’s proposal, a coalition of frontier labs is forming, and its standards are likely to be blessed by the world’s leading government-backed AI safety institutes.

That leaves India, one of the world’s largest AI markets, with an uncomfortable question: When those standards arrive, will it be able to test them — or the models they govern — for itself? Today, it cannot. India needs its own AI Safety Institute, and it needs it working now.

AI Safety institutes are organisations designed to test AI models for risk, and develop the........

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