---
id: "2025-11-27-iclr-2026-ai-reviews-openreview-leak"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-11-27-iclr-2026-ai-reviews-openreview-leak/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2025-11-27"
date_precision: day
category: policy-safety
importance: 3
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 4
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-07"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-11-27-iclr-2026-ai-reviews-openreview-leak/

# 21% of ICLR 2026 peer reviews flagged as fully AI-written; a bug exposes reviewers

Full title: ICLR 2026 review crisis: 21% of peer reviews flagged fully AI-written, and an OpenReview bug exposes reviewer identities

In late November 2025 Pangram Labs screened all ~19,490 submissions and ~75,800 reviews for ICLR 2026. It found 21% of the reviews were fully AI-generated and more than half showed some AI use, as Nature reported. On 27 Nov 2025 an OpenReview API bug exposed the author, reviewer and area-chair identities of 10,000+ ICLR papers (~45%). ICLR reverted reviews, reassigned area chairs and desk-rejected papers involved in collusion attempts.

## 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Pangram: Pangram predicts 21% of ICLR reviews are AI-generated](https://www.pangram.com/blog/pangram-predicts-21-of-iclr-reviews-are-ai-generated) (pangram.com, official)
2. [ICLR Blog: ICLR 2026 Response to Security Incident (3 Dec 2025)](https://blog.iclr.cc/2025/12/03/iclr-2026-response-to-security-incident/) (blog.iclr.cc, official)
3. [Nature: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03506-6) (nature.com, press)
4. [Science: Hack reveals reviewer identities for huge AI conference](https://www.science.org/content/article/hack-reveals-reviewer-identities-huge-ai-conference) (science.org, press)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2026-06-02: [NeurIPS 2026: 28% of position-track submissions score 100% AI-written, and 178 are desk-rejected](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-06-02-neurips-2026-position-track-ai-papers/index.md)
- 2026-05-14: [arXiv will ban authors for a year if they post unchecked LLM-generated content](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-05-14-arxiv-one-year-ban-unchecked-ai/index.md)
- 2025-03-12: [Sakana's AI Scientist-v2 writes the first fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review](https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-03-12-sakana-ai-scientist-v2-peer-review/index.md)