🚨 AAAI 2026 is here... and the chaos begins! 🚨

[root]

Let's share any of your thoughts around

• Submissions ️
• Reviewer roulette
• Rebuttals ️
• Decisions (a.k.a. heartbreaks or celebrations)

Whether you’re sweating over rebuttals, raging at “Reviewer #2”, or just curious about the wild ride of AAAI paper decisions — let’s talk.

How’s your experience so far?
Any horror stories or surprising wins?
What do you wish AAAI would fix in the process?

No matter if you’re a first-time submitter or a battle-hardened veteran, share your thoughts — let’s make the peer review circus a little less lonely .

Drop your hot takes below ️

[cocktailfreedom]

lol a few days ago, AAAI just casually dropped the first-round “reviewer gift pack” and it was wild…
people opened their dashboard and saw 8 papers at once. hit refresh? suddenly 11. felt like a surprise loot box nobody wanted

then on the same day, the system started pulling them back, like “oops, jk.” now it seems to be 3 reviewers per paper… but yeah, still mostly reviewing direct competitors so not exactly a win. and if you only got 1 paper in round one, chances are you’ll be drafted again in round two. mental prep advised

the backdrop: 22k+ submissions this year. absolutely bonkers. the random assignment thing made a lot of us worried about another “Who is Adam” moment. the new reciprocal review rules might help a bit, but it still feels messy

funny part tho… some folks i know haven’t been assigned a single paper yet, while others are buried alive. truly RNG (Random Number Generator) reviewer roulette at its finest.

so yeah, any other reviewers got their “big pack” yanked overnight? would you rather deal with the madness of 8–11 papers, or this slow-burn redistribution? curious how y’all are coping.

[root]

[AAAI-26] Review deadline extension, OpenReview now available

Dear xxx,

The Phase 1 review deadline for Program Committee members has been extended to Tuesday September 2 at 11:59pm AOE (Anywhere on Earth).

The OpenReview website is active once more for your reviewing tasks. If you have sent recent email was related to the OpenReview site outage, this issue has now been resolved.

Please accept our apologies for this outage.

If you have sent a recent email unrelated to the site outage (or still having trouble with OpenReview), please resend your email to the Workflow Chairs address (workflowchairs26@aaai.zendesk.com).

Thank you, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins Matthew E. Taylor AAAI-26 Program Chairs

[river]

Looks like the AAAI-26 rollercoaster isn’t slowing down anytime soon.

Both the latest notices confirm what many of us have been feeling: the review timeline is slipping yet again. Originally, Phase 1 notifications were due Sept 8. Then the OpenReview crash pushed it to Sept 12. Now the official word is Sept 15.

• August 4, 2025
  Supplementary material and code due by 11:59 PM UTC-12

• September 15, 2025
  Notification of Phase 1 rejections

• October 7–13, 2025
  Author feedback window

• November 8, 2025
  Notification of final acceptance or rejection (Main Technical Track)

That three-day “extra wait” might not sound like much, but for authors it’s brutal. It means:

• Suspended in mid-air: checking inbox + OpenReview every morning, still no word.
• Rebuttal delayed: the author response window got pushed past the October holidays — which makes sense only if reviews themselves aren’t ready.
• Compressed transfer time: folks planning to bounce to ICLR 2026 if rejected are losing precious prep days. With ICLR abstract due Sept 19 and full paper Sept 24, every delay cuts deep.

To add spice, the program chairs hinted the Phase 1 rejection rate could hit 50–67%. That means only ~1/3 of submissions will survive past the first cut. With nearly 29,000+ papers in the system — more than double last year — the scale is unprecedented .

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The bigger picture

• Emergency “last-minute reviewers” are being pulled in to cover gaps.
• Other conferences are also bending: NeurIPS’s “dual-city” experiment saw accepted papers later force-rejected due to quota caps.
• The pattern is clear: our current peer review model is hitting a breaking point. Technical crashes, reviewer overload, rebuttals turning into vent sessions — all signs of strain.

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Open questions for us as a community

• Do we just accept longer waits and higher rejection odds as the new normal?
• Should AAAI (and other big A* conferences) move toward dynamic, rolling review models rather than single-shot deadlines?
• Or do we need to rethink reciprocal review obligations more fundamentally — to balance load without roulette-style assignments?

For now, all we can do is hang tight until Sept 15 ( no more extensions). But honestly, given the trajectory, I wouldn’t be surprised if “Sept 15” becomes “Sept whenever.”

Anyone here already prepping ICLR as a fallback? Or are you holding out for the rebuttal round?