BEIJING, March 27 (Xinhua) -- Multiple Chinese scientific organizations have announced boycotts of a top-tier international AI conference, after this foundational research seminar cited a U.S. sanctions list to bar certain Chinese scholars from submitting papers.
The China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) issued a statement on Friday, announcing the immediate suspension of accepting funding applications from scholars to attend the 2026 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and barring papers accepted by this year's NeurIPS from applying for CAST's programs.
The China Computer Federation (CCF) and the Chinese Association of Automation (CAA) also released statements this week, urging Chinese computer scientists to refuse submitting papers to or providing academic services for the conference to be held in December 2026 in Sydney.
The backlash stemmed from a new clause in NeurIPS's submission guidelines this year, which prohibits scientists from a wide range of Chinese entities -- including AI firms like Huawei and several Chinese universities -- from submitting papers or participating in peer review, citing "sanctions and trade restrictions" under "U.S. legal jurisdiction."
Politicizing academic exchange undermines the core values of openness, inclusiveness, equality and cooperation, and runs counter to the universally recognized norms of the international academic community, according to CCF and CAA statements.
NeurIPS was recommended by the CCF as an A-class conference in the field of artificial intelligence, and is widely regarded, alongside ICML and ICLR, as one of the top-tier conferences with high standards and strong influence in the field.
The NeurIPS Foundation is a U.S.-registered nonprofit organization whose official website states its mission is to "foster the exchange of research advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, principally by hosting an annual interdisciplinary academic conference with the highest ethical standards for a diverse and inclusive community."
If NeurIPS fails to correct its mistake in a timely manner, the CCF will remove it from its recommended list, the federation said.
China maintains that the U.S. government should stop overstretching the concept of national security, stop politicizing trade and sci-tech issues, and stop abusing various sanctions lists to unjustifiably suppress Chinese companies. ■
