The organizers of NeurIPS, one of the most coveted and oldest annual conferences on Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, have formally apologized to China, after they barred submissions from certain U.S. sanctioned institutions including Huawei Technologies.
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026) is scheduled to be held in Sydney, Australia from December 06-12 and the organization has called for paper submissions from institutions and organizations all over the world.
Recently, the organizers had released the NeurIPS 2026 handbook that mentioned certain U.S. sanctioned institutions from China including Huawei Technologies from submissions to the annual event.
“Openness, inclusiveness, equality and cooperation are the core values of academic exchange and fundamental principles recognized by the international academic community,” the CCF said. “NeurIPS’s ban on submissions from specific institutions and its politicization of academic exchange violate these basic principles,” reported South China Morning Post (SCMP).
In response, NeurIPS Foundation issued a formal apology on their website, claiming that barring certain institutions from submission was an internal communication mistake on their behalf.
“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. This error was due to a miscommunication between the NeurIPS Foundation and our legal team (sic),” read a statement from the NeurIPS Foundation.
The foundation claimed that they have updated the handbook link after removing the U.S. sanction terms and have apologized to China.
“As in previous years, NeurIPS welcomes submissions from all compliant institutions and individuals,” added the statement.
The case became the latest flagpoint between the U.S. and China in the context of the global AI dominance race. Earlier, US authorities had arrested the co-founder of Super Micro and another Taiwan national for allegedly trying to send AI technology to China via Taiwan.
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