NYU mathematician alleges dispute with OpenAI over Navier-Stokes research

NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster says he and Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge announced three proofs and a preliminary finding involving the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems.

The problem carries a $1 million bounty from the Clay Mathematics Institute for the first person or group to provide a solution. Buckmaster says the researchers learned that information about their progress had reached OpenAI. He says OpenAI then told them it had already achieved a full proof, while offering increasingly unclear answers about when its work began and how much human input it involved.

Buckmaster alleges that OpenAI used its computing resources after recognizing that the researchers’ approach was promising. Sebastian Bubeck, who leads OpenAI’s mathematical research, called those claims “false and inflammatory.” OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment about whether Codex interactions could have informed its work.

The researchers used a mix of AI models, relying primarily on OpenAI’s Codex. Alpöge worked at Anthropic but was not conducting the research on the company’s behalf. Buckmaster says Bubeck proposed removing Alpöge’s credit and later warned him against damaging his career. Buckmaster also says he is not accusing anyone and has not seen OpenAI’s proof.