BEFORE THE MATH FIGHT, THE LEAK FIGHT — NYU MATHEMATICIAN SAID OPENAI BUILT ON HIS PRIVATE RESEARCH

About 12 hours before OpenAI announced a proposed solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem on 8 September 2026, NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster issued a statement saying that advances he and Anthropic's Levent Alpöge had made on the related Euler equations had been leaked to OpenAI a few days earlier and may have inspired the prompts behind its result. The pair had worked in secrecy for at least a year, using large language models from both Anthropic and OpenAI, and said they had intended to delay announcing until they could produce human-written papers.

OpenAI denied directly using their work, pointing to significant differences in proof methods, while acknowledging it could not rule out that de-identified data derived from their use of its products had helped improve its models — a point that raised questions about whether the pair's Codex sessions, including draft papers, could have been accessed or used in training. OpenAI had offered Buckmaster authorship arrangements and the $1 million Clay Mathematics Institute prize if he would rewrite or precede its announcement, which he declined, and exchanges between the sides included remarks Buckmaster took as hostile. The Institute has not acknowledged any party for a correct solution.