Mathematician Accuses OpenAI of Unfair Play Over Millennium Prize...

Mathematician Accuses OpenAI of Unfair Play Over Millennium Prize Problem

On September 11, 2026, the Australian Financial Review published an interview in which NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of "unfair play" surrounding its announcement of a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations, claiming that data from his research with Levent Alpoge leaked to the company before the September 8 announcement.

Compiled by Sergey KostenchukPublished 2026-09-11Updated 2026-09-18

2026-09-11 Business OpenAI

🧮 Mathematician Accuses OpenAI of Unfair Play Over Millennium Prize Problem

NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster told the Australian Financial Review that data from his year of work with Codex and Claude leaked to OpenAI before the September 8 announcement: an unreleased model called Astra claimed to have solved the Navier-Stokes equations in ~88 hours on ~10,000 agents.

🌍 The first major dispute over priority in solving a "millennial" problem with AI agents: the Clay Institute has not certified the solution, and OpenAI "cannot rule out" the contribution of anonymized user data.

👤 For those using Codex or Claude in research: sessions may be used to train models — check opt-out; the solution has not yet been independently reproduced.

Source 1: https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/not-selling-my-soul-why-this-aussie-maths-professor-took-on-openai-20260911-p60wf8 Source 2: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/openai-navier-stokes-math-problem-solved.html

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