The 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) opens in Seoul, South Korea on Monday, July 6, running through Saturday, July 11 at the COEX Convention & Exhibition Center. ICML 2026 received 23,918 submissions after the initial round of desk rejections and withdrawals — more than double the submissions received in 2025, which itself had set a record with 12,107. Of those, 6,352 papers were accepted at a 26.6% acceptance rate, with 536 papers (2.2% of all submissions) earning Spotlight designations and 168 papers (the top 0.7% of all submissions) receiving Oral presentation slots. Program chairs announced that 497 papers — roughly 2% of all submissions — had been desk-rejected after 398 reciprocal reviewers were found to have violated the conference's LLM usage policies. The clearest signal about the field's direction came from workshop proposals, where some variation of "agentic AI" appeared in the titles of no fewer than 60 submitted workshop proposals.