Top US AI conference apologises after sanctions policy sparks backlash in China

NeurIPS said it had gone beyond its legal obligations under US sanctions when outlining changes to its submissions policy earlier this week.

Photo: Shutterstock The organisers of a leading artificial intelligence conference have apologised after a new policy that appeared to bar US-sanctioned entities from participating sparked a backlash in China, saying the ban was more limited than initially indicated.

The apology came after several major Chinese professional bodies urged domestic researchers to boycott the event, amid concerns that prominent tech groups such as Huawei Technologies would be excluded.

In a statement on Friday, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) said it had gone beyond its legal obligations under US sanctions when outlining changes to its submissions policy earlier this week. “In preparing the NeurIPS 2026 handbook, we included a link to a US government sanctions tool that covers a significantly broader set of restrictions than those NeurIPS is actually required to follow,” it said. “This error was due to miscommunication between the NeurIPS Foundation and our legal team.” In its initial announcement on Tuesday, the San Diego-based NeurIPS Foundation included a link to a US Office of Foreign Assets Control website listing sanctioned institutions, including Huawei, China Telecom and China Unicom.

The move drew swift criticism in China, with the China Computer Federation (CCF) threatening to remove the conference from its list of recommended international academic conferences and journals, while the China Association for Science and Technology said it would halt subsidies for researcher attending the event. “Openness, inclusiveness, equality and cooperation are the core values of academic exchange and fundamental principles recognised by the international academic community,” the CCF had said in response to the announcement. “NeurIPS’s ban on submissions from specific institutions and its politicisation of academic exchange violate these basic principles.” The China Computer Federation (CCF) had threatened to remove the conference from its list of recommended international academic conferences and journals.

Photo: Reuters Often billed as the world’s premier AI conference, NeurIPS draws tens of thousands of leading researchers each year to present cutting-edge work.

It has also become a key recruitment battleground where US and Chinese tech firms compete intensely for AI talent.

At last year’s event – he

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