Why AI Safety is a Capital Allocation Problem
AI safety is too often framed as a puzzle for engineers or regulators. But beneath the technical benchmarks and policy papers lies a harder, more structural question: who controls the money? As frontier AI development grows ever more capital-intensive, the decisions that shape safety are increasingly made not in research labs but in boardrooms, term sheets, and portfolio reviews.
Jenny Xiao, co-founder and General Partner at Leonis Capital, joins us to reframe the safety debate through the lens of capital markets and corporate governance. Drawing on her unique perspective from early research at OpenAI to leading a research-focused VC fund, she will argue that many of the field's toughest dilemmas are, at their core, questions of capital allocation.
In this talk, Jenny will cover:
The Capital-Safety Nexus: How rising compute costs, sky-high valuations, and investor obligations influence which research gets funded, which risks are taken seriously, and when models are released, often without anyone explicitly demanding shortcuts.
Voluntary Commitments Under Pressure: Why promises to pause or prioritise safety are weakest exactly when they would be most costly to honour, and how financing structures create invisible but powerful incentives that override good intentions.
Governance as a Safety Mechanism: What it would actually take to build safety into the system, not through appeals to ethics alone, but through control over capital, decision rights, and incentive design.
The Hard Questions for Investors and Founders: How capital providers, board members, and entrepreneurs can think differently about their role in shaping the trajectory of transformative AI.
It is a conversation about power, money, and accountability. The forces that ultimately determine whether safety is a priority or an afterthought. For anyone who wants to understand why the AI industry behaves the way it does, and what might genuinely change that behaviour, this discussion is essential.
Who should attend: This talk is designed for investors, founders, board members, policy professionals, and AI researchers who want to understand the financial and governance realities driving AI development. It is also highly relevant for anyone concerned with how economic power shapes technology—no technical background required.
About the Speaker:
Jenny Xiao is the co-founder and General Partner at Leonis Capital, a research-focused VC firm based in Silicon Valley. Prior to Leonis, she was an early employee and researcher at OpenAI, and holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her research has been featured in Nature, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fortune, and CNBC. Her work at Leonis is the subject of an extensive Harvard Business School case study, and she is a frequent speaker at leading industry conferences including Fortune and SuperReturn. She is also a recipient of the Forbes 30 Under 30 award.
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