At the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, Galgotias University presented what it described as a demonstration of Indian AI innovation: a robot showcasing the nation's technological capabilities on an international stage. The robot was a commercially available Unitree Go2 — a Chinese-made product that can be ordered online for a few thousand dollars.
Indian authorities, according to Reuters, were not amused. The university was asked to withdraw from the AI showcase. Social media documented the moment in full, and the story became a viral and embarrassing episode at an event designed to demonstrate India's AI ambitions.
The incident is a perfect parable for the moment we're in. Every government on earth wants to claim an AI victory. The race to demonstrate national AI capability is real, funded, and geopolitically loaded — particularly for India, which is simultaneously positioning itself as a global AI talent hub, an emerging manufacturing alternative to China, and a sovereign digital power that doesn't need to depend on American or Chinese infrastructure.
Against that backdrop, presenting a Unitree robot as domestic innovation isn't just embarrassing — it's damaging. It tells international partners and domestic investors that the country's institutions are willing to put optics ahead of substance. That reputational cost is hard to quantify but real.
To be fair to India's actual AI ecosystem: it's genuine and growing. The country has real strengths in software engineering, data science talent, and a growing startup ecosystem. Graduates from the IITs are embedded throughout global AI research. India's AI policy frameworks have shown genuine sophistication in places. The Unitree embarrassment should not be taken as representative of the entire Indian AI story.
But the incident does expose a systemic pressure: the gap between the political desire to declare AI leadership and the time it actually takes to build the infrastructure, research base, and product ecosystem that would justify that claim. That gap creates incentives for exactly this kind of theatrical shortcut.
The technology is impressive — Unitree's actual engineers, working in China, built a genuinely capable robot. The question is whether India's political timeline for AI supremacy is calibrated to the speed of genuine development, or to the speed of the news cycle. The summit incident suggests the latter, at least in some corners.
