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

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.” 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 – held across two locations for the first time, partly amid concerns that Chinese participants might face US visa hurdles – a team from Alibaba Cloud, including chief technology officer Zhou Jingren, was among four winners of the conference’s best paper award, following a similar achievement by researchers from ByteDance and Peking University a year earlier. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post. The NeurIPS Foundation said on Friday that its policy only prohibited participation by “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons” (SDNs) under US law – a list of fully sanctioned entities that did not include major Chinese AI companies such as Huawei and SenseTime, which were primarily subject to trade restrictions. China has become the largest contributor to NeurIPS in recent years, according to data from European advisory firm AI World, driven by research from institutions such as Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Chinese tech firms including Alibaba, ByteDance and Ant Group were also major sponsors of last year’s conference. None responded to requests for comment on whether they would continue their involvement following the controversy. The CCF directory carries significant weight in China’s academic and corporate sectors. A researcher at a leading Chinese AI company, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue, said it was widely used to assess job candidates and determine eligibility for funding support.