China’s not thrilled its AI experts want to leave the country

Urges scientists to avoid major conference, and looks unkindly on Meta's Manus acquisition

China appears to be unhappy about its brightest AI talent going offshore, either to visit or to sell their wares.

One sign of Beijing’s ire appeared this week in a statement from the China Computer Federation (CCF), an organization that promotes development of computer science academics in the Middle Kingdom.

The CCF’s beef is with the Neural Information Processing Systems foundation, organizer of the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the fortieth edition of which will take place in Sydney, Australia, later this year.

On the NeurIPS conference site, the organization notes that as it operates in the US legal jurisdiction, it must observe laws that prevent it from providing services to entities the US State Department designates as “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons” (SDNs). NeurIPS therefore believes it can’t accept submissions from any SDN or affiliates.

The CCF’s statement accuses NeurIPS of violating the values of openness, inclusiveness, equality, and cooperation that it says are core values of academic exchange, and calls on the org to “immediately correct its erroneous practices, and restore equal rights for submissions and academic exchange to all institutions.”

The federation called on all Chinese computer scientists to boycott NeurIPS and refuse to submit papers.

The Register often spots presentations by Chinese computer scientists who attend academic CompSci conferences held outside the Middle Kingdom. Attendees often represent the country’s tech giants and present candid insights into their operations and innovations.

CCF clearly doesn’t want presentations of that sort at NeurIPS, which would likely mean some significant Chinese boffins don’t make it to Sydney.

Other major hosts of academic CompSci conferences, like the Association for Computing Machinery, are also US-based and may therefore also have to ensure that no SDN-linked entities attend their events.

We’ve asked NeurIPS for comment and will update this story if we receive a substantive response.

The spat between CCF and NeurIPS comes in the same week that Beijing has reportedly prevented the founders of agentic AI startup Manus from leaving China. Such a ban would complicate social networking giant Meta’s planned acquisition of the company.

Manus established an entity in Singapore to get better access to funding and customers. The move also made it an easier acquisition target.

Beijing reacted angrily when Meta bought Manus, on grounds that it doesn’t want domestic AI companies going offshore.

And now Chinese computer scientists have been given a reason to stay at home, too.

Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants like Alibaba are building their own AI stacks comprising home-grown chips, models, and networks.

China’s central planners have made widespread AI adoption a major goal. And perhaps one they intend to pursue alone. ®