The OpenAI–mathematicians feud escalated into a weekend standoff: a Fields-Medalist letter, a withdrawn Caltech sponsorship, and a $1M prize in limbo

“An NYU mathematician says OpenAI offered him sole authorship of its breakthrough paper — on the condition he drop his Anthropic-employed collaborator.”

Usable claims

• Per Buckmaster's own statement (his account, his quotes; contested by OpenAI — see the response-layer claim): he and Levent Alpöge made public 'finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler', after obtaining the blowup results 'on August 15th' and verifying on Lean 'on August 22nd'; 'My work with Levent has been a purely personal collaboration, free of any institutional agreements or official involvement by either of our employers.' He credits the underlying program to Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa ('I believe Luis Martínez-Zoroa deserves a Fields Medal.') and describes the writeup quality bluntly: 'The Euler writeup, in particular, can only be described as AI slop. I am sorry for this.' The contested sequence, in his telling: on Thursday, September 3, with 'a rumor circulating that Anthropic had resolved a major open problem, and with Levent having received tips that information about our progress had been passed to OpenAI', he emailed a prominent mathematician at OpenAI, whose same-day reply included: 'If you are willing to give any details it would be useful to avoid competing here and in general we are always thrilled when mathematician make progress with our models. Additionally if there is anything in terms of compute from OpenAI's end we would be happy to provide it.' On Sunday, September 6, after two calls that afternoon (Sébastien Bubeck joined; Alpöge was not on the calls), Buckmaster writes: 'I was told that an internal OpenAI model had produced a proof of finite time blowup for the forced Navier-Stokes equations' — about 100 pages, which he has not seen — with the precise statement relayed to Alpöge as 'Existence of forced blowup in R3 and T3' with 'the forcing function is smooth option c and d in Fefferman'. He writes that Levent 'had been told by Sebastien "very little human input" had been used. This turned out not to be true', and that over the call 'it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.' He asked whether the model had been trained on or had access to their Codex sessions: 'I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.' The two proposals offered: post their Euler result with OpenAI posting Navier-Stokes the next day, or — after posting Euler — Buckmaster alone writes the paper presenting Navier-Stokes. 'Sebastien twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic.' He declined both offers, said he would go public, and quotes the replies: 'Why would you ruin your career?' and 'If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice.' A text to Alpöge proposing a one-on-one read: 'I don't know if Tristan is being fully rational right now.' The statement's own scope, verbatim: 'I have not seen OpenAI's proof. I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used. I am not accusing anyone of anything. I am stating what I was told, when, and what was proposed to me.'
• OpenAI's response layer, carried via two outlets (OpenAI's own post is JS-rendered and was not openable this run; both outlets quote it). Per TechCrunch (September 8): OpenAI's post says 'We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem' and 'While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).' Per TechCrunch, 'OpenAI's post confirms much of this timeline, specifically saying that the latest effort began on September 1, inspired by rumors that two Millennium Prize problem had been solved' (grammar sic), and 'the week-long effort consumed 300 billion output tokens — $22.5 million worth of compute, if charged at current Astra rates' — the dollar figure being TechCrunch's conditional valuation, not a stated OpenAI spend. Four days later, the framing hardened: per The Verge (September 12), OpenAI spokesperson Laurance Fauconnet said in a statement, 'We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster's Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training.' — a categorical statement that goes beyond the post's own 'While unlikely, we cannot rule out...' wording (the contrast between the two dated OpenAI-layer statements is quoted, not editorialized). On the conduct allegation, per The Verge: 'Bubeck has rejected Buckmaster's characterization of the conversations on social media and in an interview with The New York Times. He acknowledged offering OpenAI's resources to help Buckmaster complete his own proof or to have him take over the writing of the company's. Strikingly, Bubeck said OpenAI had made similar arrangements with other mathematicians, though did not identify them.' Bubeck to the Times, quoted by The Verge: 'From our perspective, how can we have an internal OpenAI project with an Anthropic employee?' On scale, per The Verge's relay of OpenAI's post: 'OpenAI says it took roughly 10,000 agents, tens of millions of dollars of compute, and just 88 hours to find a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem' — figures The Verge carries that TechCrunch's piece does not (its figures: 300 billion tokens, week-long); the two outlets' numbers are carried per-outlet, never blended. And per The Verge, Fauconnet added: 'since the completion of Navier-Stokes we have made substantial progress on another Millennium Prize problem,' with the company 'working through how to share these results thoughtfully' — 'Which problem remains unclear. Unconfirmed speculation on social media suggests this could be the Hodge conjecture... Rumors are also circulating that Anthropic is closing in on a Millennium Prize problem of its own.'
• Community and institutional response layer. Per TechCrunch (September 11): 'Twenty-five leading mathematicians signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they seek to one-up each other with solutions to famous math problems. Each signatory has been awarded the Fields Medal, considered the most prestigious prize in mathematics.' The letter, quoted by TechCrunch: 'Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others' — 'and OpenAI's proof remains unverified'; 'As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions. Moreover, without the willing mathematicians who must take care of their development and integration into the mathematical canon, AI-conceived ideas would never become fully alive and the crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost'; and: 'The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing, and indicate issues that all of humanity might face: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.' Per TechCrunch: 'On Thursday, OpenAI withdrew its sponsorship of a math event at CalTech after the company was criticized by researchers at the university' (Thursday = September 10), and the letter follows June's Leiden Declaration. Per The Verge (September 12), which 'spoke with more than a dozen mathematicians': the Leiden Declaration is 'endorsed by the International Mathematical Union and signed by nearly 3,900 people, an increase of nearly 500 people since I last covered it in mid-August'; the Caltech event was 'an undergraduate mathematics hackathon' withdrawn 'following fierce opposition decrying the intrusion of corporate interests and worries the event would create a deluge of low-quality "slop mathematics."' Clay Mathematics Institute status per The Verge: 'The Institute has removed it from its list of unsolved problems, though hasn't yet declared it solved.'; the prize requires two years after publication and 'general acceptance in the global mathematics community'; Institute statement: 'The process is deliberately unhurried.' Each Millennium Prize problem 'carries a $1 million bounty'; only the Poincaré conjecture 'has fallen' since 2000. Field voices per The Verge: Shing-Tung Yau — 'Working on hard problems already carries considerable risk for Ph.D. students and junior faculty... The prospect of competing with powerful AI companies, whose resources far exceed those available to academic research groups, could make them even more reluctant to pursue ambitious questions.', the tool-provider-plus-competitor position 'raises a serious conflict-of-interest concern', and 'That concern deserves a substantive response... It should not simply be dismissed as ordinary competition.'; Andreas Thom — the earlier amendment episode was 'not a very pleasant experience', whether his ChatGPT conversations fed the models that built on his work is answerable only by OpenAI ('To be honest, I suspect that they don't even know.'), and 'I don't really trust them.'; Buckmaster — 'The reality is that mathematicians are actually scared of them', and 'They don't care anything about us as a community. It's all about this petty drama between two trillion-dollar companies that are acting like children.'