What forced NeurIPS into an impossible position was not geopolitics in the abstract but the operational mechanics of US sanctions compliance. Barring submissions from Huawei, SenseTime, and other sanctioned institutions was a legal posture — the kind organizations adopt quietly to avoid liability. The Chinese research community read it as exclusion, and the institutional response was proportionate to that reading. The China Computer Federation's boycott call and CAST's formal escalation transformed what organizers may have treated as an administrative detail into a [widening rift between Chinese AI researchers and US-based…