China's major research funding agency announced it will stop paying for researchers to attend NeurIPS and will devalue the conference in career evaluations after the organizers initially banned papers from researchers at US-sanctioned institutions — a policy they later reversed. Chinese researchers now represent more than half of all lead authors at the conference, making any actual boycott a significant blow to the event's prestige and reach. The dispute signals broader friction between US and Chinese AI research communities and Beijing's growing confidence in developing AI talent independently.