NeurIPS, one of the world’s most prestigious AI research conferences, held its 39th annual meeting in San Diego in December, drawing tens of thousands of submissions and participants. What was once a largely academic gathering has become a prime hunting ground for top AI labs, where a strong showing can translate directly into job offers. Researchers whose papers are accepted for live presentation are considered among the field’s elite.
Yet Canadian startup GPTZero analyzed more than 4,000 research papers accepted and presented at NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) 2025 and says it uncovered hundreds of AI-hallucinated citations that slipped past the three or more reviewers assigned to each submission, spanning at least 53 papers in total. The hallucinations had not previously been reported.
