AAAI 2027 alerts reviewers to collusion in 2-cycle bidding

The AAAI 2027 organizers' email about collusion in the review process marks a rare public acknowledgment of a problem that many in the research community have long suspected. The focus on 2-cycles—where authors review each other's papers—highights a specific vulnerability in peer review, especially when a large share of submissions originate from a single country. The original poster declines to name that country, fearing accusations of racism, but the implication is that the algorithm's natural tendency to create such cycles among co-nationals could be exploited. This acknowledgment could lead to changes in how assignments are made or how submissions are monitored. The comment about top-conference papers lacking public code on GitHub is a separate but related concern about research integrity, suggesting that the issue extends beyond collusion to reproducibility. Whether AAAI will release submission statistics, as it did previously, remains an open question that could provide more transparency.