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

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 ...