OpenAI announced it discovered a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem — a major math problem that has remained unsolved for around 90 years — using an internal AI model more powerful than the newly released GPT-6 Astra alongside 10,000 concurrent agents. The company started training the model on August 28th, and says it has exhibited unprecedented performance in mathematics benchmarks. The Navier-Stokes problem is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems, each worth $1 million.
Just one day before OpenAI's announcement, New York University mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster published findings on a related problem in partnership with Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge. Buckmaster claims he contacted OpenAI after learning the company had heard about their progress, but found that OpenAI had produced a proof using a route he and Alpöge had been working on with OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude.
Buckmaster raises concerns about whether OpenAI had accessed their Codex data, writing: "I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project." OpenAI says no specific user data was accessed to solve the problem, though it cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their product usage helped improve models. OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck stated they did not see Buckmaster and Alpöge's work until public release.