OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem this week, claiming its model found the answer using 10,000 agents, tens of millions of dollars in compute, and 88 hours of runtime. In any other year, this would have been greeted as a landmark achievement. Instead, the announcement has become the center of a dispute that is forcing mathematicians to reckon with what it means when an AI company with effectively unlimited resources decides to treat their field as a competition to win.

The Verge spoke with more than a dozen mathematicians for a detailed account of what happened. Even those skeptical of the most serious allegations described a field shaken by OpenAI's conduct and worried about what comes next.

The Race That Started With a Rumor

The sequence of events began when OpenAI heard that researchers were making progress on Millennium Prize problems and decided to test whether one of its unreleased models could contribute. It turns out it could. The company also discovered who it was racing against: Tristan Buckmaster, an NYU professor, and Levent Alpöge, a researcher at Anthropic. The two were pursuing Navier-Stokes among several lines of research, though they had not completed a proof.

Buckmaster told The Verge that he contacted OpenAI after learning the company had become aware of their progress and was racing toward a solution. He said discussions with OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck grew contentious and, in his view, threatening. The company offered Buckmaster a path forward that excluded Alpöge. Buckmaster said he was offered practically unlimited compute to finish his own work, and the opportunity to be the sole author of OpenAI's paper announcing the breakthrough, which would credit its tools.

"All I had to do was throw Levent under the bus," Buckmaster told The Verge. He said he flatly rejected the offer, which he viewed as a bribe. Bubeck has rejected Buckmaster's characterization 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.

His account makes clear that Alpöge's affiliation with Anthropic was a sticking point. "From our perspective, how can we have an internal OpenAI project with an Anthropic employee?" he told the Times.

The Data Question

Buckmaster also raised a separate concern: whether his use of Codex, one of OpenAI's coding tools, could have contributed to the company's mathematical breakthrough. OpenAI spokesperson Laurance Fauconnet told The Verge that Buckmaster's Codex prompts over the last two months could not have influenced the system in any way, including training. Buckmaster is unconvinced. "Given their behavior up until this point, one should take such statements with great skepticism," he said.

A second mathematician, Andreas Thom, a professor at the Technical University of Dresden, found himself at the center of a related controversy last month. OpenAI announced a mathematical result that built heavily on work by Thom and fellow researcher Gábor Kun. The company quietly amended its announcement to acknowledge the pair's contribution without publicly disclosing the change. Thom described the ordeal as not a very pleasant experience.

Thom told The Verge he had largely put the issue behind him until Buckmaster went public. Buckmaster's allegations prompted Thom to revisit an unresolved question about OpenAI's breakthrough: whether conversations he and his colleagues had with ChatGPT about the research could have been used to help improve the models that ultimately cracked the problem he had spent years working on. Only OpenAI has the information needed to answer that question, Thom said. "To be honest, I suspect that they don't even know."

What Mathematics Actually Values

The dispute exposes a fundamental difference in values between academic mathematics and the tech companies now operating in the field. Mathematicians care deeply about the lineage of ideas. Frontier mathematics rarely has a prescribed route to a answer. Researchers attack problems from any number of angles, some radically different, which makes the techniques that lead to a solution often more important than the solution itself. New methods frequently prove more consequential than the problem they were designed to solve.

Andras Juhasz, a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, described mathematics as an elegant discipline that is part science, part art. "Often there is no immediate practical application," he said. "They do it because it's beautiful. They enjoy it. It's the sense of discovery."

OpenAI operates on a different logic. To Buckmaster, his exchanges with Bubeck typify the chasm between research mathematics and Big Tech. Reading from notes he took while chatting with Bubeck, he said the OpenAI researcher was visibly taken aback when he rejected the company's offer to take credit. "I could see Sébastien's face. He was shocked when I said I don't care about the Millennium Prize," Buckmaster recalled.

In the tech world, Buckmaster said, there is an intense fixation on prestige, fame, being first, and being seen to be first. "That's the only currency," he said.

The Chilling Effect

For all the rush, OpenAI will not know whether it has won the Millennium Prize for solving Navier-Stokes for years. The Clay Mathematics Institute requires a two-year waiting period since publication, during which the result must receive general acceptance in the global mathematics community. The Institute has removed Navier-Stokes from its list of unsolved problems, though it has not declared it solved. "The process is deliberately unhurried," the Institute said in a statement.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has already moved on. Fauconnet told The Verge that since completing Navier-Stokes, the company has made substantial progress on another Millennium Prize problem and is working through how to share these results thoughtfully. 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.

As the two AI giants race to collect mathematical trophies, they are discovering that astonishing results alone are not enough to earn the trust of the community they are transforming. Mathematicians are beginning to push back. Many The Verge spoke to, even the most enthusiastic proponents of AI in the field, worried the companies were having a chilling effect on research, pushing mathematicians to be more secretive about unfinished work for fear someone may swoop in and beat them to it. Several said colleagues who had previously compiled lists of important unsolved problems were reconsidering the practice, concerned that what was intended as a useful resource for the field could instead become a list of targets for AI companies.

In June, mathematicians published the Leiden Declaration, a set of principles for the responsible use of AI in mathematics that has been endorsed by the International Mathematical Union and signed by nearly 3,900 people. It urges policymakers, governments, the media, and other groups not to buy into the hype created by companies who overstate the capabilities of their products. As the Millennium Prize controversy raged, OpenAI withdrew its sponsorship of an undergraduate mathematics hackathon at Caltech following fierce opposition.

Thom summed up the broader resentment many mathematicians feel. He said he resents what he sees as a failure to recognize the communal effort that the entire community has put into the research results underpinning AI's recent mathematical advances. Companies, he said, are just now using it as if it was kind of nothing. "I think there is a certain attitude that I don't like in that," he said.

The competition is not going to slow down. But the community it is disrupting is organizing, and the rules of engagement are being written in real time.