The tallest in the world Artificial Intelligence Research Conference, Neural Information Processing Systems Conference – better known as NeuroIPS— became the latest organization this week caught up in the growing conflict between geopolitics and global scientific cooperation. Conference organizers announced and then quickly reversed controversial novel restrictions on international participants after Chinese artificial intelligence researchers threatened to boycott the event.
“This is a potential watershed moment,” says Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge, a consulting firm who studies U.S.-China relations. Triolo argues that attracting Chinese researchers to NeurIPS is beneficial to U.S. interests, but some U.S. officials have insisted that U.S. and Chinese scientists separate their work – especially in the field of artificial intelligence, which has become a particularly sensitive topic in Washington.
The incident could deepen political tensions around artificial intelligence research and discourage Chinese scientists from working at American universities and technology companies in the future. “Now, at some level, it will be difficult to keep basic AI research out of the market [political] image,” says Triolo.
In its annual paper submission manual, released in mid-March, NeurIPS organizers announced updated participation restrictions. The rules stated that the event could not provide “peer review, editing and publishing” services to any organizations subject to U.S. sanctions and affiliated with database entities subject to sanctions. They included companies and organizations from the Office of Industry and Security list of entities and those on another list with alleged connections to the Chinese army.
The new rules would impact researchers from Chinese companies such as Tencent and Huawei who regularly present work at NeurIPS. The database also includes entities from other countries, including: Russia and Iran. The United States imposes restrictions on doing business with these organizations, but there are no rules regarding academic publishing or conference attendance.
The NeurIPS manual has since been updated to clarify that the restrictions only apply Specially Designated Citizens and Blocked Personsa list mainly used to refer to terrorist groups and criminal organizations.
“In preparing the NeurIPS 2026 handbook, we have included a link to the U.S. government’s sanctions tool, which includes a much broader set of restrictions than those that NeurIPS must actually comply with,” event organizers said in a statement. statement released on Friday. “This error resulted from a misunderstanding between the NeurIPS Foundation and our legal team.”
Before they changed course, the conference organizers initially he said that the novel provision concerned “the legal requirements applicable to the NeurIPS Foundation, which is responsible for compliance with the sanctions”, adding that it had requested legal consultations on the matter.
Immediate opposition
The new rule has been met with rapid response from AI researchers around the world, particularly in China, which produces a large number of cutting-edge publications on machine learning and is home to a growing percentage of the world’s top AI talent. Several academic groups there issued statements condemning the move and, more importantly, discouraging Chinese scientists from attending NeurIPS in the future. Some urged Chinese scientists to attend national research conferences instead, potentially helping to increase the country’s influence in relevant fields of science and technology.
The China Association of Science and Technology (CAST), an influential government-affiliated organization of scientists and engineers, said Thursday it will stop providing funds to Chinese scientists traveling to attend NeurIPS and will instead use the money to support domestic and international conferences that “respect the rights of Chinese scholars.”
CAST also said it will no longer count publications at the 2026 NeurIPS conference as academic achievement when assessing future research funding. It is unclear whether the organization will change course now that NeurIPS has backed down from the novel rule.