Microsoft founder Invoice Gates has cancelled his keynote speech at India’s flagship AI summit simply hours earlier than he was resulting from take the stage on Thursday.
Gates, who has confronted renewed scrutiny over his previous ties to the late intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein, withdrew to “guarantee the main target stays on the AI Summit’s key priorities”, the Gates Basis mentioned in a press release.
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The five-day India AI Affect Summit 2026 was meant to showcase India’s ambitions within the booming sector, with the nation anticipating to draw greater than $200bn in funding over the following two years.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had billed the summit as a possibility for India to form the way forward for AI, drawing high-profile attendees, together with French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
As a substitute, it has been dogged by controversy, from Gates’s abrupt exit to an incident by which an Indian college tried to cross off a Chinese language-made robotic canine as its personal innovation.
So, what precisely went incorrect at India’s flagship AI gathering and why has it drawn such intense scrutiny?
Why Gates’s look turned a problem
Invoice Gates was resulting from ship a brief however high-profile speech highlighting the alternatives and dangers posed by synthetic intelligence.
Nonetheless, in current weeks, a number of opposition figures and commentators in Indian media weighed in after emails that includes his identify have been launched within the Epstein recordsdata in late January, questioning whether or not his presence was acceptable.
Regardless of the dialogue, all gave the impression to be continuing as deliberate earlier within the week. On Tuesday, the Gates Basis’s India workplace posted on X that Gates would attend the summit and “ship his keynote as scheduled”.
Then, on Thursday, hours earlier than the scheduled speech, it launched a press release saying that “After cautious consideration, and to make sure the main target stays on the AI Summit’s key priorities, Mr Gates won’t be delivering his keynote handle.”
It added that Ankur Vora, president of the Gates Basis’s Africa and India workplaces, would ship the speech as a substitute.
What are the alleged hyperlinks between Epstein and Gates?
Invoice Gates was named in paperwork associated to Epstein launched in January by the US Division of Justice.
In a draft e mail included among the many paperwork, Epstein alleged Gates had engaged in extramarital affairs and sought his assist in procuring medicine “to take care of penalties of intercourse with Russian ladies”.
It was unclear whether or not Epstein really despatched the e-mail, and Gates denies any wrongdoing.
The Gates Basis, in a press release to The New York Occasions, referred to as the allegations “completely absurd and utterly false”.
What has India’s authorities mentioned?
Little or no.
Regardless of criticism and calls from opposition figures to elucidate the invitation to Gates, the Indian authorities has in a roundabout way addressed the controversy that culminated in Gates’s withdrawal.
Whereas unnamed authorities sources informed native media he wouldn’t attend the summit, officers stopped wanting explaining why.
Requested about Gates’s participation, Info Know-how Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw declined to provide a transparent reply to reporters, whereas Modi made no reference to the problem in his public remarks.
Why are the Epstein recordsdata a delicate topic for India?
The controversy surrounding Gates’s deliberate participation comes shut on the heels of a sequence of disclosures within the Epstein recordsdata which have compelled the Modi authorities on the backfoot.
In a single e mail to an unidentified particular person he referred to solely as “Jabor Y”, Epstein referred to Modi’s historic go to – the primary by an Indian prime minister – to Israel in July 2017.
Epstein wrote: “The Indian Prime minister modi took recommendation. and danced and sang in israel for the good thing about the US president. they’d met just a few weeks in the past.. IT WORKED. !”
Modi’s go to to Israel – and his subsequent embrace of the Benjamin Netanyahu authorities, with navy, intelligence and different ties strengthened over the previous decade – had already drawn criticism from the opposition Congress social gathering and others, who’ve accused him of reversing many years of Indian help for the Palestinian trigger. India was the primary non-Arab nation to recognise the Palestine Liberation Group in 1974, and didn’t set up full diplomatic relations with Israel till 1992.
However the Epstein e mail turbocharged the opposition criticism of Modi’s Israel coverage – with questions now additionally requested about whether or not it was influenced by Washington.
The Indian Ministry of Exterior Affairs dismissed the Epstein e mail in an unusually sharply worded assertion.
“Past the very fact of the prime minister’s official go to to Israel in July 2017, the remainder of the allusions within the e mail are little greater than trashy ruminations by a convicted felony, which should be dismissed with the utmost contempt,” spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal mentioned.
However the Epstein cloud continues to hover over India.
The recordsdata additionally present that India’s present oil minister, Hardeep Singh Puri, exchanged dozens of emails with Epstein after he joined Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Occasion in 2014.
In lots of them, Puti seems to be taking Epstein’s assist in getting US buyers, equivalent to LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, to go to India. In others, he seems to counsel that he had a reasonably snug private relationship with Epstein.
“Please let me know when you find yourself again out of your unique island,” Puri wrote in December 2014, for example, asking to arrange a gathering by which Puri might give Epstein some books to “excite an curiosity in India”.
Puri, in a brand new convention, has claimed that he solely met Epstein “three or 4 instances”, however the Congress social gathering has argued that the emails counsel a a lot nearer relationship.
Gates’s work in India
The Gates Basis has lengthy been a key companion in India’s public well being and improvement sectors, backing main vaccination drives, illness prevention campaigns and sanitation programmes.
On the similar time, he has had vocal critics, together with environmental activist Vandana Shiva, who has argued that Gates’s model of “philanthro-imperialism” makes use of wealth to regulate world meals programs.
Gates additionally confronted heavy criticism after a 2024 podcast by which he mentioned India was “a form of laboratory to strive issues … that then, whenever you show them out in India, you may take to different locations” when discussing improvement programmes and the inspiration’s work there.
‘Orion’ the robodog and different controversies
Past the fallout over Invoice Gates’s cancelled keynote, the AI Affect Summit has confronted a number of controversies.
One incident concerned a robotic canine named “Orion”, which Galgotias College, based mostly within the New Delhi suburban city of Better Noida, offered as its personal innovation.
On-line customers shortly recognized the machine as a commercially obtainable Chinese language-made mannequin, prompting organisers to ask the establishment to vacate its stall.
The occasion additionally drew criticism on its opening day after dealing with logistical points, together with lengthy queues and confusion over entry procedures, in keeping with native media.
On Wednesday, massive crowds have been seen strolling for miles after police cordoned off roads for VIP entry.
Dhananjay Yadav, the CEO of an organization exhibiting high-tech wearables, made headlines after he reported on social media that units had been stolen from the corporate’s stand.
The Occasions of India later reported that two upkeep staff on the occasion had been arrested for allegedly stealing the wearables.
