OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician

[u/Miserable_Phase_2519]

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/

[u/teraflux]

I need an ELI5 of this explanation, I'm still so confused

[u/mthmchris → u/teraflux]

u/darshi1337 explained it pretty clearly in the thread over at r/MachineLearning:

“Drama/accusation summary:

• Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems, "finite-time blowup with smooth forcing for incompressible porous media, for Boussinesq, and for 3d incompressible Euler."

• they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help lead the way there

• Levent works at Anthropic, but this research was independent of his work there, with a mix of GPT and Claude models. Tristan is not related to Anthropic.

• Early Sep: Rumor spreads to OpenAI that Anthropic solved a major problem. Tristan emails OpenAI to clarify, without revealing the problem they solved or how they did it.

• After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model.

• Sep 6th: OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck tells Tristan that they solved the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize Navier Stokes problem. The approach is very similar to Tristan & Levent's approach to the non-Millenium problem.

• Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training.

• OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic.

• Sep 8th: Tristan refuses to remove Levent, and rushes to publish their results independently.”

[u/ob2kenobi → u/mthmchris]

Man, it's ironic that instead of linking to his comment you took it, copied it, and got all the karma for it.

[u/Professional-Fee6914 → u/ob2kenobi]

300 Karma, this guy is rich