OpenAI announced that its internal AI system solved the Navier-Stokes equations, one of the famous Millennium Prize Problems from the Clay Mathematics Institute. The company described a massive effort: roughly 10,000 AI agents worked for about 88 hours, exchanging millions of messages and generating around 130 billion tokens before producing a computer-verified proof. However, the announcement quickly sparked controversy. Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster (NYU) and researcher Levent Alpöge (Anthropic) had been working on closely related fluid-dynamics research. Buckmaster raised concerns that OpenAI might have learned about their progress and rushed down a similar research path. OpenAI denied accessing their unpublished work directly but acknowledged it cannot rule out that anonymized data from users’ interactions with OpenAI products might have indirectly helped improve the models.
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