About

My work sits at the intersection of law, technology, and governance - but I've come to that intersection by way of building. Over the past decade, I've been a securities lawyer, a product manager, and a startup general counsel. That combination shapes how I think about the question at the center of my work: how do we govern technologies that are evolving faster than the institutions meant to regulate them?

I started my career as a corporate lawyer at S&R Associates in Mumbai, working on public securities offerings and M&A transactions including the US$23 billion Vodafone-Idea merger. But I quickly found myself drawn to the technology side - first as a product manager at the fintech startups Kaleidofin and Simpl, where I spent four years building products for underserved communities in India, including scaling credit underwriting models from 4 to 500 branches in rural India. That experience changed how I understood regulation. When you've had to redesign a product overnight because of a Supreme Court ruling, or lead a corporate restructuring to navigate a shifting regulatory landscape, you develop a different intuition for where the gap between law and technology actually lives. I came away convinced that the people shaping the rules for emerging technologies need to understand what it takes to build under them.

That conviction carried me into blockchain, where I served as General Counsel at KGEN, a web3 distribution protocol valued at US$500 million and backed by Accel, Prosus, Aptos, and Polygon. I led legal, policy, and product counsel across multiple jurisdictions, closed a US$10 million strategic ecosystem round, and developed the legal strategy for a token generation event and exchange listing - work that sat squarely at the intersection of technology design and regulatory architecture.

I completed my LL.M. at UC Berkeley School of Law in May 2026 with a Certificate of Specialization in Law & Technology, graduating on the Dean's List in the top 10% of my class. Coming to Berkeley expanded my focus from blockchain to AI governance - both technologies that pose the same fundamental question: how do you regulate systems that are powerful, rapidly evolving, and not well understood by the people writing the rules?

At Berkeley, I was a Research Fellow with the Supervised Program for Alignment Research (SPAR), working on AI economic rights, and a Graduate Student Researcher with Prof. Colleen Chien, building technology-led tools to scale access to justice through the Paper Prisons Initiative - including serving as teaching assistant for the vibe-coding module of her course on the law and governance of artificial intelligence. I served as Blog Editor at the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, sat on the boards of the Berkeley AI Safety Initiative and AI at Berkeley Law, and mentored startups at the Berkeley Digital Assets Xcelerator.

Today, I'm a scholar with MATS Research (10.0 cohort), mentored by Cristian Trout (AIUC), designing a federal government backstop for catastrophic AI risk. I'm also leading a research project on decentralized identity for AI agents - a legal analysis across the US, EU, and India demonstrating that existing law already functionally demands verifiable identity for AI agents - supported by a grant from the Decentralization Research Center.

I also keep building. I placed in the Top 10 at ETH Denver 2026 and won second place in the EigenLayer Track at Berkeley's 10^2 Hackathon in October 2025. My recent projects include an autonomous AI agent for criminal record expungement, an automated litigation monitoring pipeline for crypto enforcement actions, and various tools at the intersection of AI and legal infrastructure. I build because I believe that people who write the rules should understand what it takes to ship the product - and building is how I keep that understanding current.

My research has been presented at workshops at ICML, ICAIL, and CHI. My writing has appeared in Tech Policy Press and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal Blog, and has been featured in the Financial Times' FT Alphaville recommended reading list.

Get in Touch

I'm always interested in conversations about AI governance, technology policy, and law. You can reach me at anita@berkeley.edu.