OpenAI’s math breakthrough raises a harder question: who gets credit?
OpenAI says its agents solved the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems, but the claim is already tangled in a credit dispute involving NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic’s Levent Alpöge. The deeper shift is unsettling: if frontier models and their enormous compute budgets become essential to major proofs, mathematics may have to redesign its norms for attribution, collaboration, and verification.