Vinay Rao | Deploying AI safety from Anthropic to Google

This episode is in English. In this episode, we sit down with Vinay Rao, one of the world's leading voices on AI systems and security, in a special edition recorded live at our Founder Summit in Mallorca. Vinay has spent twenty years in security at the world's largest technology companies. Most recently he served as Head of Safeguards at Anthropic, where he led key initiatives to ensure the safe deployment of frontier models. He is now VP Engineering for Cloud AI at Google, heading up model safety and quality. A deeply technical profile with a Stanford PhD and a background in statistical modelling, Vinay walks us through how he first got into security at Google, solving click fraud with statistics. Airbnb, and Stripe came next, each with an entirely different set of safety challenges. Together we unpack how AI is moving out of the experimental phase and into strategic territory, with direct consequences for product, risk and business model. We get into specifics, from jailbreaks that get a model to reveal its own training data, to prompt injection in agents running inside a company, to scams that play out across several platforms so that none of them ever sees the whole attack. Vinay explains how safety and security have converged as agents operate inside the organisation. We talk about what this means for a startup facing the same threats as a large enterprise without any of the structure, and how much of your security stack is actually worth building in house. We close by widening the lens. What role governments should play over technology they do not control, where national security ends and mass surveillance begins, and what happens when state actors stop shaping narratives and start going after companies directly. A conversation about how security will determine how far AI goes and how fast, with someone who has spent two decades on that frontier. Chapters 0:00 Vinay Rao, 20 years inside trust and safety 4:09 The three kinds of bad actors on any platform 6:27 How AI collapses the safety team into a few people 8:11 Why safety and security can no longer sit apart 10:29 Scams and where accountability breaks down 17:53 Open source safety tools for teams too small to build their own 24:52 Deciding what to buy, build or borrow, and the open weights danger 30:00 The open stack and the model race ahead 35:24 Moats and where the value really accrues 40:11 Geopolitics, sovereign data and trusting governments over labs 47:08 State actors, coordinated attacks across platforms and fragmented defence Watch also on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8W-Y046OEuc Samaipata is a leading early-stage founders' fund investing in tech companies with network effects across Europe. Founded in 2016 by José del Barrio and Eduardo Díez-Hochleitner. 45 European companies backed, €250M in AUM across three funds. https://samaipata.vc