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.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- Sakana's AI Scientist-v2 writes the first fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review (ICLR 2025 workshop) ★★★★
- arXiv will ban authors for a year if they post unchecked LLM-generated content ★★★
- NeurIPS 2026: 28% of position-track submissions score 100% AI-written, and 178 are desk-rejected ★★
Sources (4)
- pressNature: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI
- officialPangram: Pangram predicts 21% of ICLR reviews are AI-generated
- officialICLR Blog: ICLR 2026 Response to Security Incident (3 Dec 2025)
- pressScience: Hack reveals reviewer identities for huge AI conference
id: 2025-11-27-iclr-2026-ai-reviews-openreview-leak · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline