Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster believes OpenAI used his work to rush ahead and beat him to solving a legendary math problem with a $1 million bounty.
But that’s not been enough for him to stop using the company’s models—and he’s not the only mathematician that feels that way.
“Even if you don’t agree with any of this, you’re kind of stuck. With AI being so useful, it’s hard to completely prevent oneself from using it,” Buckmaster tells WIRED. “These companies have a monopoly, and there is not much choice,” he adds.
In the week and half since the New York University professor accused OpenAI of copying his approach, Buckmaster has been using the company’s coding agent Codex to tidy up his research papers. When he has time to do math (which he says is rare, since the fallout thrust him into the spotlight), the tool has been helping him understand the logical steps OpenAI’s agents might have taken to get from his earlier workings to the final proof.
Buckmaster had used Codex as well as Anthropic’s competing Claude to work on what’s known as the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, alongside Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge. OpenAI deployed tens of thousands of agents to reach the solution, but only after it learned the equation was close to being solved, Buckmaster says.
When Buckmaster went public with his claims, it ignited a firestorm about artificial intelligence and whether it would make human mathematicians obsolete. It also led OpenAI to do an investigation and amend its announcement about solving Navier-Stokes to say it “confirmed that Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the two months preceding this announcement and paper on September 8, 2026, could not have influenced the system in any way, including through training.” The company pointed WIRED to its announcement in an email.
Showing that AI was pushing the boundaries of mathematics was “more important than the result,” Buckmaster says. But churning out solutions to long-standing math problems without fully crediting the human work undergirding them—especially ahead of major IPOs—is irresponsible and “childish,” he says.
Other mathematicians have raised similar concerns. Only a handful of people on the planet understand the techniques in geometric group theory that German mathematician Andreas Thom has dedicated the last two decades to developing. So when OpenAI said in August that its Astra model had used them to prove a long-standing problem he had been working on, “I was amazed,” says Thom. “And of course I was wondering, how did they learn about it?”
So he says he asked OpenAI researchers Mark Sellke and Sébastien Bubeck. In an August email, he pointed out that the firm’s assertion that “no progress” had been made on the problem in the last decade overlooked a 2019 paper of his, as well as other mathematicians’ work. The company amended its press release. He and a colleague had been using ChatGPT to assist their work on the problem in the months running up to the result, but when he asked if their interactions had been fed into training data, Thom says Sellke replied: “That did not happen.”
“I set it aside,” Thom recalls. “I’m not so much interested in these political things; I want to work on mathematics.”
While Thom has seen OpenAI’s statement that Buckmaster’s prompts couldn’t have influenced the system, he says he doesn’t trust this and concedes he will probably never know whether his work actually fed the result.
“AI really kills this entire idea that you could trace back who contributed what,” he says. “That is probably over.”
