AI Summit! NeurIPS Apology!
Excerpt from Chief of Deep Technology
Breaking! NeurIPS apologizes, and in just 4 days was 'defeated' by the Chinese academic community!
The AI summit NeurIPS has officially apologized!
On March 27, NeurIPS officially issued an apology on the X platform.
The reason is that a new clause was added to its 2026 handbook, banning 873 Chinese institutions.
Huawei, SenseTime, Hikvision, and others are all on the list.
The clause states that institutions on the OFAC sanctions list are prohibited from submitting papers.
The official defense: communication error, link coverage exceeded limits.
The violation links have now been deleted, and past policies have been restored.
This confrontation was decided in just 4 days!
Igniting the academic community! NeurIPS sanctions faced global protests
On March 23, the NeurIPS 2026 main track handbook was released, and the sanctions compliance clause was exposed, instantly igniting the academic community.
On March 24-25, many scholars from home and abroad publicly refused to serve as area chairs and reviewers. Xihua University’s Xiuyuliang declined an AC invitation, and UIUC’s Jiang Nan terminated five years of AC service, with more researchers issuing open letters to denounce the absurdity of the policy.
On March 25, the CCF strongly voiced its opposition to the policy, advocating for Chinese scholars to suspend submissions and reviews, warning that they might be removed from the recommendation directory.
On March 26, the China Association for Science and Technology halted all related funding applications, and relevant papers will no longer be included in project evaluations.
On March 27, under immense pressure, NeurIPS officially apologized and recognized its mistakes, urgently updating its policies.
History repeats itself! In 2019, IEEE faced a boycott for similar actions and ultimately compromised.
Chinese scholars have long been a core force in NeurIPS.
In NeurIPS 2025, Tsinghua University ranked first globally in the number of papers.
Academic neutrality is the bottom line, not a political bargaining chip!
Cross-border openness is the foundation of top conferences.