gates

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has cancelled his keynote speech at India’s flagship AI summit just hours before he was due to take the stage on Thursday.

Gates, who has faced renewed scrutiny over his past ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, withdrew to “ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit’s key priorities”, the Gates Foundation said in a statement.

The five-day India AI Impact Summit 2026 was meant to showcase India’s ambitions in the booming sector, with the country expecting to attract more than $200bn in investment over the next two years.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had billed the summit as an opportunity for India to shape the future of AI, drawing high-profile attendees, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Instead, it has been dogged by controversy, from Gates’s abrupt exit to an incident in which an Indian university tried to pass off a Chinese-made robotic dog as its own innovation.

So, what exactly went wrong at India’s flagship AI gathering and why has it drawn such intense scrutiny?

Why Gates’s appearance became an issue

Bill Gates was due to deliver a short but high-profile speech highlighting the opportunities and risks posed by artificial intelligence.

However, in recent weeks, several opposition figures and commentators in Indian media weighed in after emails featuring his name were released in the Epstein files in late January, questioning whether his presence was appropriate.

Despite the discussion, all appeared to be proceeding as planned earlier in the week. On Tuesday, the Gates Foundation’s India office posted on X that Gates would attend the summit and “deliver his keynote as scheduled”.

Then, on Thursday, hours before the scheduled speech, it released a statement saying that “After careful consideration, and to ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit’s key priorities, Mr Gates will not be delivering his keynote address.”

It added that Ankur Vora, president of the Gates Foundation’s Africa and India offices, would deliver the speech instead.

What are the alleged links between Epstein and Gates?

Bill Gates was named in documents related to Epstein released in January by the US Department of Justice.

In a draft email included among the documents, Epstein alleged Gates had engaged in extramarital affairs and sought his help in procuring drugs “to deal with consequences of sex with Russian girls”.

It was unclear whether Epstein actually sent the email, and Gates denies any wrongdoing.

The Gates Foundation, in a statement to The New York Times, called the allegations “absolutely absurd and completely false”.

What has India’s government said?

Very little.

Despite criticism and calls from opposition figures to explain the invitation to Gates, the Indian government has not directly addressed the controversy that culminated in Gates’s withdrawal.

While unnamed government sources told local media he would not attend the summit, officials stopped short of explaining why.

Asked about Gates’s participation, Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw declined to give a clear answer to reporters, while Modi made no reference to the issue in his public remarks.

Why are the Epstein files a sensitive subject for India?

The controversy surrounding Gates’s planned participation comes close on the heels of a series of disclosures in the Epstein files that have forced the Modi government on the backfoot.

In one email to an unidentified individual he referred to only as “Jabor Y”, Epstein referred to Modi’s historic visit – the first by an Indian prime minister – to Israel in July 2017.

Epstein wrote: “The Indian Prime minister modi took advice. and danced and sang in israel for the benefit of the US president. they had met a few weeks ago.. IT WORKED. !”

Modi’s visit to Israel – and his subsequent embrace of the Benjamin Netanyahu government, with military, intelligence and other ties strengthened over the past decade – had already drawn criticism from the opposition Congress party and others, who have accused him of reversing decades of Indian support for the Palestinian cause. India was the first non-Arab nation to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1974, and did not establish full diplomatic relations with Israel until 1992.

But the Epstein email turbocharged the opposition criticism of Modi’s Israel policy – with questions now also asked about whether it was influenced by Washington.

The Indian Ministry of External Affairs dismissed the Epstein email in an unusually sharply worded statement.

“Beyond the fact of the prime minister’s official visit to Israel in July 2017, the rest of the allusions in the email are little more than trashy ruminations by a convicted criminal, which deserve to be dismissed with the utmost contempt,” spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said.

But the Epstein cloud continues to hover over India.

The files also show that India’s current oil minister, Hardeep Singh Puri, exchanged dozens of emails with Epstein after he joined Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014.

In many of them, Puti appears to be taking Epstein’s help in getting US investors, such as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, to visit India. In others, he appears to suggest that he had a fairly comfortable personal relationship with Epstein.

“Please let me know when you are back from your exotic island,” Puri wrote in December 2014, for instance, asking to set up a meeting in which Puri could give Epstein some books to “excite an interest in India”.

Puri, in a new conference, has claimed that he only met Epstein “three or four times”, but the Congress party has argued that the emails suggest a much closer relationship.

Gates’s work in India

The Gates Foundation has long been a key partner in India’s public health and development sectors, backing major vaccination drives, disease prevention campaigns and sanitation programmes.

At the same time, he has had vocal critics, including environmental activist Vandana Shiva, who has argued that Gates’s brand of “philanthro-imperialism” uses wealth to control global food systems.

Gates also faced heavy criticism after a 2024 podcast in which he said India was “a kind of laboratory to try things … that then, when you prove them out in India, you can take to other places” when discussing development programmes and the foundation’s work there.

‘Orion’ the robodog and other controversies

Beyond the fallout over Bill Gates’s cancelled keynote, the AI Impact Summit has faced several controversies.

One incident involved a robotic dog named “Orion”, which Galgotias University, based in the New Delhi suburban town of Greater Noida, presented as its own innovation.

Online users quickly identified the machine as a commercially available Chinese-made model, prompting organisers to ask the institution to vacate its stall.

The event also drew criticism on its opening day after facing logistical issues, including long queues and confusion over entry procedures, according to local media.

On Wednesday, large crowds were seen walking for miles after police cordoned off roads for VIP access.

Dhananjay Yadav, the CEO of a company exhibiting high-tech wearables, made headlines after he reported on social media that devices had been stolen from the company’s stand.

The Times of India later reported that two maintenance workers at the event had been arrested for allegedly stealing the wearables.

You may have read recently how minions of the Trump administration removed an exhibit about slavery from the President’s House in Philadelphia (where George Washington lived, with slaves) as part of its ongoing sop to MAGA sensitivities and campaign to erase history in favor of a fairy tale in which the worst thing Washington ever did was chop down a cherry tree.

The study of history is by nature messy, replete with conflicting interpretations and incomplete puzzles, but it’s what you need to know in order not to repeat it. PBS, lately defunded by conservatives but not disassembled, is among the institutions working to bring it to the people — indeed, the only television outlet seriously devoted to it. (History Channel is just a name.) Premiering Tuesday and continuing weekly is the four-part series “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History,” presented by Henry Louis Gates Jr., at the start of what happens to be Black History Month.

Gates, who also hosts the PBS genealogy series “Finding Your Roots,” has presented such documentaries as “Africa’s Great Civilizations” and “Great Migrations: A People on the Move,” has made cameo appearances in HBO’s “Watchmen” series and “The Simpsons.” He teaches at Harvard and is a well-known public figure — a history communicator, scholar and storyteller and a minor TV star the world also knows as “Skip.” Even-tempered and even-handed, he’s a good guide through the minefields of racial history — he keeps you from blowing up. You might find yourself angry at the material, but not with Gates.

“Under the floorboards of Western culture run two streams, continuously,” he says. “One is antisemitism, one is anti-Black racism,” whose purpose here is to explore “the areas of overlap.” They aren’t the only victims of bigotry in American history and modern America; Italians and Irish immigrants had their turn, too. White supremacy, which is very much alive in the land — turn on the news — disdains every people of color. But as people who shared the experience of being “mocked and feared, blamed and banished, envied and imitated,” often allied, sometimes antagonists, theirs is a special case.

Gates has assembled a stimulating, illuminating, maddening, saddening, but often inspiring, story of their relations with the world and one another. (Here and there he reaches a little outside his theme.) At 75, he’s lived through a good slice of the history illuminated here, including “our brief golden age” of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and though he structures his series as a pendulum swinging between worse and better news, he scrupulously bookends it in a hopeful mood, with a Seder to start and a discussion with students to end. His insistence that no one is safe until everyone is safe, can seem to portend a future in which no one will ever be safe, though as a teacher I assume he’s more sanguine. His manner, at least, is encouraging.

The Seder, which begins with a singing of “Go Down Moses (Let My People Go),” gathers a tableful of Black, white and biracial Jews — each distinguished enough to have their own Wikipedia pages — in a roundtable discussion. Participants include New Yorker editor David Remnick, author Jamaica Kincaid, journalist Esther Fein, rabbi Shais Rishon, Angela Buchdahl (the first East Asian American to be ordained as a rabbi); and culinary historian Michael Twitty, who provides the doubly meal — kosher salt collard greens, West African brisket and potato kugel with sweet and white potatoes and Creole spice.

Though both Jews and Black people faced (and face) discrimination, their American journeys were launched, says Gates, “on different trajectories,” one group chased from nominally Christian countries, the subject of durable medieval superstitions, the other dragged from their homes. Though the mass of Jewish migration, escaping Russian pogroms and Nazi Germany in succeeding waves, occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some arrived before the revolution; but the Constitution, which enshrined religious freedom, granted them legal rights. (This presumably did not help the Jews of African descent Gates says were present here early on.) Black people, kidnapped and enslaved, had none, and as freedom was gained, new laws were written to hold them in place.

Gates posits a sympathy between immigrant and first- and second-generation Jewish Americans in the 20th century and disadvantaged Black people, based on a common experience of oppression; Jewish newspapers used the word “pogrom” to describe violence against Black people in the South. And Jews, many raised with a sense of social justice, were disproportionately represented among white activists in the Civil Rights Movement. This would change: Where Martin Luther King declared “I’m more convinced than ever before that our destiny is tied up with the destiny of our Jewish brothers and vice versa, and we must work together,” later Black activists, like Stokely Carmichael preferred to go it alone, promoting self-determination and even separation.

Still, many of the stories here are based on Black and Jewish friendships. We learn of W. E. B. Du Bois and Joel Spingarn, who sat together on the board of the NAACP and to whom Du Bois dedicated his 1940 autobiography “Dusk of Dawn.” Of Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, a president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., who built schools — more than 5,000 nationally, eventually — for systemically disadvantaged Black students. (Graduates included Maya Angelou and John Lewis.) Of Chicago rabbi Abraham Heschel, bringing 15 other white rabbis down to Selma, Ala., in 1964 at the request of King, where their arrest made headlines — which translated to political pressure.

In music, we meet Louis Armstrong, who as a boy worked and stayed with a Jewish family, and wore a Star of David, and his manager Joe Glaser. We’re told the story of Billie Holiday‘s lynching ballad “Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol (under his pseudonym Lewis Allan), recorded by Milt Gabler for his Commodore label and performed regularly by Holiday at Barney Josephson’s Cafe Society, New York’s first truly integrated nightclub. And we hear Paul Robeson, daring to sing in Yiddish in a concert in Moscow, in support of Itzik Feffer, a Jewish poet imprisoned (and later murdered) by the Soviets.

As a social and political history covering two intersecting storylines for more than the length of the nation, it’s packed with incident and facts — the Klan resurgent after World War I (six million members, it says here); the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where Jesse Owens triumphed and the U.S. committee pulled two Jewish sprinters from competition; racist Nazi policies, borrowed from American Jim Crow, and the Holocaust. Also the domestic destabilizing effects of wars in the Middle East. Jews and Black people will find themselves on the opposite sides of some questions.

Even at four hours, it’s a survey course, streamlined but not simplistic, and as such it will fly through some points and elide others; there are whole volumes dedicated elsewhere to what constitutes a single sentence here, and libraries dedicated to some of these figures. (Why not read some?) The view is not singular, and as such, there’ll be something for everyone to question, especially as Jews and Black people are often described as a community, when neither is heterogeneous. (Jews don’t even agree on what makes a Jew.)

But whatever goes back and forth between then, the world has its own ideas. “People who hate Jews,” says Gates, “uncannily hate Black people too. Because when the stuff hits the fan, they’re coming after both of us.”