Among more than 5,000 accepted papers at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last month, mainland China accounted for about 44% of contributions from the top 50 institutions, with Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University and Peking University ranking as the top four contributors globally.

Some social media users noted that if Hong Kong’s 7.7% share were added to mainland China’s total, China’s contribution would exceed half of all papers presented at the conference, according to the South China Morning Post.

"If you count mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore as mostly Chinese, and add the many Chinese-American researchers [in the US], AI research is basically a Chinese racket," one user identifying himself as a Silicon Valley hi-tech entrepreneur wrote.

Campus view of Tsinghua University, China. Photo courtesy of Tsinghua University

Tsinghua University accounted for the highest number of accepted papers, with some 332 accepted submissions, according to an analysis by Dmytro Lopushanskyy, a Ukrainian computer scientist now serving as AI technical lead at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

The U.S. accounted for about 32% of the papers, led by Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, each producing roughly half as many papers as Tsinghua.

European universities contributed less than 10% of the papers, according to the analysis.

Lopushanskyy used a "unique affiliation" method, meaning each institution received one full count for every paper it appeared in, regardless of how many co-authors or partner organizations were involved.

ICLR is widely regarded as one of the "Big Three" conferences in AI and machine learning, focusing on areas such as neural networks, large language models and reinforcement learning.

A separate report by the Nature Index also showed China leading global research capacity rankings. In its 2026 list, all but one of the world’s top institutions by research output were based in China.

Harvard University was the only U.S. institution in the top ranks, placing second, while the Chinese Academy of Sciences remained in first place, a position it has held since the Nature Index was launched in 2014.