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NVIDIA's open robot brain gets a production licence: GR00T N1.7 reaches general availability

NVIDIA's GR00T line of open robot foundation models has quietly passed the point that matters most to anyone trying to build a product on it. When N1.7 was announced in early access on 17 April 2026, the headline item was not a benchmark but a legal clause: the release ships, in NVIDIA's own words, with "a license that supports production use cases". Earlier versions of the model were distributed under a non-commercial NVIDIA licence. The Isaac-GR00T repository now describes N1.7 as generally available, with support and stability guarantees; NVIDIA has not attached a date to that step, so we report the general availability as a state of the repository rather than as a dated event. Under the licence change sits a real architectural swap. The vision-language backbone is now Cosmos-Reason2-2B, built on the Qwen3-VL architecture, replacing the Eagle backbone used in N1.6 — NVIDIA's own reasoning model has moved inside NVIDIA's own robot policy. The action head remains a flow-matching diffusion transformer, but its depth reverses the previous release: N1.6 had doubled it from 16 to 32 layers, and N1.7 cuts it back to 16. Two capabilities are new: structured reasoning at task and subtask level, and finger-level actuation aimed at contact-rich work such as small-parts assembly. The model card is unusually forthcoming about cost. Pretraining used 21.6 million data points from 13 datasets, and NVIDIA publishes what that run consumed: 41,288 kWh and 16.949 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. The deployment numbers are equally concrete, and they show the price of putting the policy on the robot itself. With TensorRT on an H100 a step takes 27.9 ms — 35.9 Hz. On a Jetson Orin only the diffusion transformer can be compiled, because TensorRT 10.3 does not support the backbone engine, and the same step takes 216.5 ms, or 4.6 Hz. One inconsistency is worth flagging, because both statements come from NVIDIA: the research page for N1.6 described that version as using an internal Cosmos-2B variant, while the N1.7 repository states that N1.6 used the Eagle backbone. We record both and prefer neither. Older versions have not been withdrawn — N1.6 and N1.5 remain available in the n1d6 and n1d5 branches. GR00T N1.7 now has its own profile in this catalogue, alongside the original N1 from March 2025. This item runs without an illustration. NVIDIA's logo is not a plain wordmark, and we could not establish a licence that permits reuse without attribution, which our news illustrations currently require.