NYU Mathematician Accuses OpenAI of Misappropriating Research on Navier-Stokes Problem

NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster announced preliminary progress on the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem in collaboration with Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge. The pair utilized OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude models to generate three foundational proofs. However, the academic achievement has been overshadowed by allegations regarding OpenAI's competing claims. Buckmaster stated that OpenAI ran a parallel effort leveraging information about their unreleased findings before they became public. Shortly after Buckmaster's statement, OpenAI published a full proof for the Navier–Stokes problem, claiming it was achieved by an unreleased next-generation model that tackled multiple unsolved theoretical problems over the past week. OpenAI reported that this week-long effort consumed 300 billion output tokens, representing approximately $22.5 million in compute costs based on current Astra rates. The Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem is one of seven Millennium Prize problems established by the Clay Mathematics Institute, carrying a $1 million award. While critical to fluid mechanics, the equations remain poorly understood theoretically. Tensions escalated when Buckmaster and Alpöge learned that details of their progress had reached OpenAI, prompting questions about the boundary between academic research and commercial AI development.