By Eduardo Baptista
SHANGHAI, March 27 (Reuters) – A leading artificial intelligence conference on Friday reversed a policy change that would have banned papers from researchers at any entity under U.S. sanctions, soon after a boycott from China’s largest federation for technology professionals.
The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, known as NeurIPS, published the new policy earlier this week, saying its California-based foundation had to comply with U.S. law.
NeurIPS – where AI companies and experts meet every December to present peer-reviewed research and discuss the latest breakthroughs – said on Friday the policy had been issued in error and apologised.
The rule change had marked an expansion of previous restrictions that only banned submissions from entities on the U.S. Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals List, a programme often used to target militants and drug traffickers.
The announcement sparked outrage in China, which is locked in an intensifying AI race with the United States, and has seen hundreds of its companies and universities put on U.S. trade blacklists.
The China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) said in a statement earlier on Friday it would stop accepting funding applications for members wanting to attend NeurIPS.
It said it would instead redirect them to domestic conferences or “international conferences that respect the rights and interests of Chinese academics”.
Soon after, NeurIPS said on X that the new restrictions had been published by mistake because of a miscommunication with its legal team and that it had updated its policy to make clear that restrictions on submissions applied only to those on the SDN list.
“The responsibility for that error is ours as an organization, and we deeply apologize for the alarm and impact this miscommunication had on our community,” NeurIPS said.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista in Shanghai; Editing by Jamie Freed and Andrew Heavens)
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