Measure adopted by the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems affects Chinese companies
The world’s leading artificial intelligence conference will ban the submission of articles from organizations on the US sanctions list, a new rule that affects several Chinese technology groups and has provoked a negative reaction in China’s academic community.
The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, known as , explicitly linked, for the first time, paper submission to compliance with US sanctions. In a handbook for the 2026 conference, released on March 23, the NeurIPS Foundation stated that it cannot provide “services” — including peer review and publication — to individuals representing sanctioned entities.
The measure formalizes a compliance practice that was previously treated on a case-by-case basis, after acceptance of the article, transforming it into an initial eligibility requirement. The move drew criticism from China’s top computing body and prompted several researchers to step down from leadership roles at the influential event.
The episode highlights how geopolitical tensions are increasingly affecting global scientific collaboration. By linking participation in a prestigious academic forum to a list of government sanctions, critics say the policy risks inhibiting the exchange of ideas and further fragmenting the international research community.
On March 25, the CCF (Chinese Computing Federation) issued a statement opposing the policy, claiming that it politicizes academic exchange and violates the principles of openness and equality. The group urged NeurIPS to reverse the decision and asked Chinese computer scientists to suspend their academic services at the conference and refrain from submitting papers.
The CCF said it could remove NeurIPS from its list of recommended international academic conferences if the policy is not changed.
The sanctions list at the center of the dispute is the SDN (Specially Designated Nationals) list maintained by the US Treasury Department’s Ofac (Office of Foreign Assets Control).
As of the end of March 2026, Chinese companies on the list included Huawei, SenseTime Group, Megvii Technology, Hikvision and Semiconductor Manufacturing International, according to Ofac. No Chinese universities have been publicly added to the SDN list, which mainly targets companies, financial institutions and individuals involved in restricted transactions.
Several academics have already declined invitations to hold leadership positions at the 2026 conference. They include Tu Zhaopeng, who leads Tencent’s Center for Digital Humans, Xiu Yuliang of Westlake University, and Chang Heng of Tencent’s AI Lab.
Jiang Nan, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote on social media that he declined an invitation to review papers for the first time since 2020: “At the very least, the organizers have an obligation to explain to us why NeurIPS is the only major machine learning conference to adopt such a policy”.
Founded in 1987, NeurIPS is among the largest and most influential meetings in the field of artificial intelligence. The conference published landmark work, including a 2017 Google paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, which underpins many of today’s major language models.
US law generally exempts the dissemination of “informative materials” from the sanctions restrictions of the Berman Amendment, but this exemption does not necessarily extend to all services.
In 2004, after the Ieee (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) expressed concern about the editing of articles by Iranian authors, Ofac clarified that peer review and standard text editing are permitted. However, substantially rewriting, restructuring, or co-writing a work with a sanctioned party may be considered a prohibited service.
The NeurIPS policy has fueled debate in China’s computer science community. Some academics have advocated a boycott, including refusing to review submitted papers, while others are in favor of continued engagement to push for greater representation in conference leadership.
“NeurIPS is still a conference with high standards, and there have long been very few Chinese in its decision-making circles”a Chinese software engineer told Caixin. He said the academic service should remain independent, but argued that Chinese academics should seek a stronger voice within the organization.
This was originally published in English by Caixin Global on March 26, 2026. It was translated and republished by Poder360 under mutual content sharing agreement.
