OpenAI Just Claimed a Huge Math Discovery. Some Academics Are Crying Foul

image via WIRED

September 8, 2026, 4:42 PM

• •OpenAI announced that its AI generated a solution related to the Navier-Stokes equation, a long-standing unsolved mathematics problem.
• •Sebastien Bubeck said OpenAI began training a new advanced math model on August 28 and scaled the effort to as many as 10,000 agents over roughly 50 hours.
• •Mark Chen said the compute used for the project cost millions of dollars.
• •Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge posted documents on related advances and say they used AI models including Claude and Codex in their work.
• •Buckmaster alleges OpenAI learned of their work and made proposals affecting attribution, while OpenAI denies inspecting their Codex prompts or proofs before public release.

OpenAI says a new math-focused AI system generated a Lean-formalized solution to the Navier-Stokes equation, one of the Clay Millennium Prize problems. The company says it devoted thousands of agents and millions of dollars in computing to the effort after hearing Anthropic was making progress on the same area. Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges OpenAI accelerated its push after learning of work by him and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge, and he says the company made problematic proposals about publication credit. OpenAI denies using the pair’s private Codex work to guide its proof and says its solution is substantially different from theirs.

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