21% of ICLR 2026 peer reviews flagged as fully AI-written; a bug exposes reviewers
Confirmed
The takeaway
In late November 2025 Pangram Labs screened all ~19,490 submissions and ~75,800 reviews for ICLR 2026.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Pangram: 15,899 of ~75,800 reviews (21%) classified fully AI-generated; >50% with some AI involvement
- Submissions: several hundred papers flagged fully AI-generated; 9% had over 50% AI content (Pangram)
- Pattern: AI-written reviews tended to give higher scores; papers with more AI text got lower scores
- OpenReview API vulnerability reported and patched 27 Nov 2025; identities for ‘over ten thousand’ papers (45% of ICLR 2026) leaked
- Leaked data was used to harass and try to bribe reviewers; ICLR froze discussions, reverted reviews to their pre-breach state (28 Nov), reassigned ACs, banned the distributor and desk-rejected papers tied to collusion
What happened
ICLR 2026 authors complained publicly about hallucinated citations and vague, padded reviews. Pangram Labs ran its detector over the whole conference and published the 21% figure, which Nature covered. In the same week a bug in the OpenReview API let anyone pull the hidden author and reviewer names for about 45% of submissions. The scraped dataset spread before it was taken down, and ICLR had to partly restart its review process.
Why it matters
It was the clearest sign yet that LLMs had overwhelmed the peer-review system of the field that builds them. It pushed conferences and arXiv toward AI-detection and accountability rules in 2026.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 2 primary, 2 press
Primary
- Pangram: Pangram predicts 21% of ICLR reviews are AI-generatedpangram.com, official
- ICLR Blog: ICLR 2026 Response to Security Incident (3 Dec 2025)blog.iclr.cc, official
Press
- Nature: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AInature.com, press
- Science: Hack reveals reviewer identities for huge AI conferencescience.org, press
Changes
- Filed