After being collectively boycotted by the Chinese academic community, the AI top conference NeurIPS issues an urgent apology

Ask AI · Why did policy changes at NeurIPS trigger a strong reaction from the academic community in China?

After the China Association for Science and Technology, the China Computer Federation, and the Chinese Association of Automation successively issued statements announcing a “boycott,” the AI academic conference NeurIPS lowered its head and apologized.

On March 27, NeurIPS published a statement on the social platform “X,” publicly apologizing for inappropriate content in the call for papers guidelines, and announced the cancellation of the policy change.

In its latest statement, NeurIPS claims that “this mistake stems from a miscommunication between the NeurIPS Foundation and our legal team… the responsibility for this mistake lies with our organization itself. We sincerely apologize to the community for the panic and impact caused by this communication mistake.”

NeurIPS also said that it has updated the links and clarified the policy text, “as in previous years,” and welcomes all institutions and individuals that meet compliance requirements to submit papers.

The fuse for this incident was that a few days ago, one of the three major AI top conferences—NeurIPS—added a clause prohibiting submissions from institutions on the OFAC sanctions list that are on the U.S. Department of the Treasury entity list; academic services such as peer review and editing were also cut off in tandem.

Within the scope of the publicly released list, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, Hikvision, China National New Infrastructure Co., Ltd., DJI, as well as the three major telecommunications operators—China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom—together with a number of AI companies and research institutions such as Huawei, SenseTime, and Megvii Technology, are all within the impact range; the relevant sanctions list entries have reached 873.

In response, the China Computer Federation, the Chinese Association of Automation, the Chinese Association of Image and Graphics, and the China Association for Science and Technology have successively issued statements criticizing the move, and have taken countermeasures such as not recognizing results and removing them from recommended directories.

It is understood that NeurIPS is an international conference in the fields of machine learning and computational neuroscience. Along with ICML and ICLR, it is known as one of the “three top machine learning conferences.” It is one of the academic achievement labels with the heaviest weight in doctoral graduation, faculty applications, and grant evaluations.

In recent years, the performance of Chinese institutions at NeurIPS has continued to rise. At NeurIPS2024, Chinese universities held 8 of the seats among the top 20 in terms of the number of papers accepted, and Zhejiang University surpassed MIT to become the institution with the most accepted papers. In 2025, NeurIPS received 21,575 valid submissions, and the proportion from China has continued to grow.

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