NeurIPS 2026: 28% of position-track submissions score 100% AI-written, and 178 are desk-rejected
NeurIPS 2026 organisers screened the position-paper track with Pangram. 273 of 969 submissions (28.2%) got a 100% AI score. 178 (18.4%) were desk-rejected and 123 more had to show evidence of human authorship. The track requires papers to be "substantially written by human authors".
Key facts
- 273/969 (28.2%) position-track submissions had a Pangram AI score of 100%
- Tiered response: 77 automatic desk rejects (score ≥ 0.9), 123 borderline (0.8–0.9) asked for evidence of human authorship, 22 rejected for denying AI use despite high scores
- Appeals deadline 15 June 2026
What happened
NeurIPS partnered with the AI-text detector Pangram to enforce a human-authorship rule on its position-paper track and published the numbers.
Why it matters
It was the first major ML venue to desk-reject papers at scale based on an AI-text detector. That is a precedent for detector-based enforcement, with the usual false-positive risks.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- ICLR 2026 review crisis: 21% of peer reviews flagged fully AI-written, and an OpenReview bug exposes reviewer identities ★★★
- arXiv will ban authors for a year if they post unchecked LLM-generated content ★★★
Sources (1)
id: 2026-06-02-neurips-2026-position-track-ai-papers · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline