Daybreak

This week, a 27-year-old researcher quit Anthropic warning AI could "kill us all," and the company's own safety lead agreed.

Meanwhile, OpenAI says it cracked a 200-year-old math problem — then got accused of muscling a rival's name off the credit.

Also, the AI lab with a supposed conscience got caught building a watchlist of AI critics that files activism next to terrorism.

And in Poland's Warsaw, 30 robots staged a protest to regulate AI.

After all of this, who actually gets to be the good guy in the AI race?

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India's foreign tourist arrivals slipped by about 8% from the year before to about 9 million in 2025, and a wave of recent reporting has finally made it a talking point. If you take out the business travellers and the diaspora visiting family, the number who came just to holiday in India may be closer to 3 million. 

And yet Indians have never travelled their own country more. Domestic trips have crossed 4 billion. The government is pouring thousands of crores into tourist circuits and temple towns like Varanasi and Ayodhya while spending almost nothing to bring foreigners in.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma asks who Indian tourism is really being built for now, and what India loses if the foreign visitor drops off the itinerary.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In 1967, Air India paid Salvador Dalí for a custom ashtray with a live baby elephant, flown all the way to Spain. (Yes, really! Here's the proof.)
 
That was the airline. Flush with money, just about 14 years  into nationalisation. 

Today, it's asking its owners for $1.5 billion after its biggest loss ever, at more than 2 billion dollars.

Privatisation was supposed to fix Air India. Three years on, it still hasn't. But the real story isn't a failed sale. It's a fatal crash, a closed airspace, and an industry that runs on razor-thin margins everywhere. But the actual fix might be closer than you think. And already sitting on Air India's own cap table.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

After years of struggling to grow, Nykaa Fashion has finally found its footing. The past year brought a real resurgence. For a long time, the platform bet on building its own private-label brands, even pushing hard into ethnic wear. It leaned on discounts and backed small, up-and-coming labels. None of it delivered the growth it was chasing. 

So Nykaa Fashion changed course. 

That new strategy is at last starting to show results. What turned it around, and how long can it last? 

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

For over a year, India's restaurant association couldn't get Swiggy to return its calls. Then Rapido launched a food delivery app that charges restaurants zero commission — and Swiggy sent fifteen people to Bengaluru for an urgent meeting within days.

The restaurants have a real grievance. On Swiggy and Zomato, commissions, ads, and discounts can eat up nearly a third of every order. On Rapido's platform, restaurants keep almost all of it.

It's a good deal for restaurants. But even restaurant owners are wondering if it might be too good a deal to last.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

When you call an Indian call centre these days, the person answering might sound American — even if they've never left India. A new kind of AI can change an agent's accent in real time, mid-call, to sound more familiar to the customer. It's meant to build trust and cut hiring costs. 

But the same software that smooths out an accent often smooths away everything else too — laughter, tone, the small things that make a voice sound human. 

Some customers have started wondering if they're even talking to a real person. We dig into how this technology works, and what it costs the people whose voices are being rewritten.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Last week, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle American lawsuits over how Instagram and Facebook treat children. The app will now be rebuilt around American teenagers, from a daily time limit to an overnight curfew. But none of it is coming to India, the single biggest market Meta has anywhere in the world.

So every op-ed page has been asking the obvious question. If Meta can protect a teenager in California, why should one in India wait? It sounds fair. But in this episode, host Snigdha Sharma argues the question is misdirected, and also that the fix we want to bring home would slip past the Indian child who needs it most.

Tune in.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Ozempic went off-patent in India this year, and everyone from Novo Nordisk to Nestlé has rushed in expecting a billion-dollar market.

Instead, growth has already stalled, and the reason isn't price. It's culture.

While Hollywood joked about Ozempic on late-night TV and Serena Williams advertised a GLP-1 program for a tele-health platform at the Super Bowl, not a single Indian celebrity has admitted to using it.

We trace why the drug ran out of India's easiest customers within months, why its next move — into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities — might not work either, and what it would actually take to sell a $200-a-month injection in a country that's only now starting to believe that obesity is a disease.

Read The Ken story about black market Ozempic here. 

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah launched Bharat Taxi, a government-backed, driver-owned ride-hailing service built to take on private players like Ola and Uber. It runs as a cooperative so the drivers own it. And when it profits, they keep 80% of the money. Nearly 800,000 have already signed up. It is the government's boldest bid yet to pull gig workers out of a precarious market and hand them a stake in it.

There is just one problem.

No one in Indian ride-hailing has ever turned a profit. So what is a driver-owned cab service really for, if the payday it promises may never come?

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

At least 44% of Indians have their money sitting in savings accounts. These accounts earn only about a fraction of what a fixed deposit pays. But even though FDs earn more, the payoff is that you have to lock away your money for longer, and pay a penalty if you break the account prematurely.

But did you know there's a product built to solve this exactly? It's called a Flexi-FD, and it promises FD-level returns with the liquidity that comes with savings accounts. Most banks offer it. And yet, not a lot of people have heard of it.

The Ken's Inderpal Singh gets into why banks aren't exactly rushing to popularise a product that's supposedly a win for depositors, and what "flexible" doesn't always mean in practice.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.