AITechOpenAIOpenAI just wants to winTwo mathematicians at the heart of recent controversies tell The Verge how AI giants’ ‘childish’ rivalries are upending the field.by Robert HartSep 12, 2026, 11:00 AM UTCShareGift Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty ImagesAITechOpenAIOpenAI just wants to winTwo mathematicians at the heart of recent controversies tell The Verge how AI giants’ ‘childish’ rivalries are upending the field.by Robert HartSep 12, 2026, 11:00 AM UTCShareGiftRobert Hart is a London-based reporter at The Verge covering all things AI and a Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for Forbes.OpenAI has spent the last few years planting flags across the increasingly difficult terrain in mathematics. This week, it claimed one of its biggest prizes yet: a solution to a legendary Millennium Prize problem. In normal circumstances, this would have been celebrated as a historic achievement.Instead, many mathematicians have watched OpenAI’s relentless advance with growing unease.
To them, the company appears less like an enthusiastic newcomer than an impossibly well-resourced interloper, charging into problems they have dedicated their lives to studying with little apparent regard for long-standing norms or the consequences for those left in its wake. At the heart of that unease is a sense that OpenAI is doing mathematics for different reasons. Mathematicians want to advance the field. OpenAI wants to win.Mathematics is not normally this dramatic, so how did things get this bad?
This week, The Verge spoke with more than a dozen mathematicians, including Tristan Buckmaster and Andreas Thom, who are at the center of recent controversies surrounding OpenAI’s work in the field. Even those skeptical of the most serious allegations described a field shaken by the tech giant’s conduct and fearful of what it might do next in its determination to trounce its rivals.Buckmaster has accused OpenAI of failing to adequately explain whether work he did through its tool Codex could have contributed to its recent successes. In a statement to The Verge, OpenAI spokesperson Laurance Fauconnet strenuously denied that material from his prompts had played a role: “We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training.”Buckmaster remains unconvinced. “Given their behavior up until this point, one should take such statements with great skepticism,” he said.Mathematics is not normally this dramatic, so how did things get this bad?
A rumor was all it took for tensions to boil over.OpenAI says it heard some researchers were making progress on Millennium Prize problems and decided to see whether one of its advanced, unreleased models could make headway too. It turns out it could. OpenAI says it took roughly 10,000 agents, tens of millions of dollars of compute, and just 88 hours to find a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which concerns the flow of fluids.The company had also discovered who it was racing against: Buckmaster, an NYU professor, and Levent Alpöge, a researcher at one of its fiercest rivals, Anthropic. Among several lines of research, the pair were pursuing Navier-Stokes, though had not yet completed a proof.
Some details of what happened next are fiercely contested, but the two sides broadly agree on the basic sequence of events. One thing is particularly clear: Alpöge’s involvement was a problem for OpenAI, despite his saying it was a “personal collaboration” independent of his work with Anthropic.Even those skeptical of the most serious allegations described a field shaken by the tech giant’s conduct and fearful of what it might do next in its determination to trounce its rivals.Buckmaster said he contacted OpenAI after learning the company had become aware of their progress and was racing toward a solution of its own. He said discussions with OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck grew contentious and, in his view, threatening, but the company offered a path forward for him — one that excluded Alpöge. Buckmaster said he was offered practically “unlimited compute” to finish his own work, and the opportunity to be the sole author of OpenAI’s paper announcing the breakthrough, which would of course credit its tools.“All I had to do was throw Levent under the bus,” Buckmaster told The Verge in a phone interview.
He said he flatly rejected Bubeck’s offer, which he viewed as a “bribe,” and also began questioning whether OpenAI may have benefited from his use of Codex, one of the company’s AI tools he had been using to tackle the problem. OpenAI has denied that anyone — or any agent — accessed his specific user data, and until its more recent comments acknowledged it could not rule out the possibility data derived from his use of the products was used to improve the model.Buckmaster ultimately decided to go public with both his work and his account of OpenAI’s conduct. His office, he said, had been transformed into something of a “war room,” with colleagues helping scrutinize his mathematics, coordinate outreach, and even get in touch with lawyers.Bubeck has rejected Buckmaster’s characterization of the conversations on social media and in an interview with The New York Times. He acknowledged offering OpenAI’s resources to help Buckmaster complete his own proof or to have him take over the writing of the company’s.
Strikingly, Bubeck said OpenAI had made similar arrangements with other mathematicians, though did not identify them.But his account nevertheless makes clear that Alpöge’s affiliation with Anthropic was a sticking point. “From our perspective, how can we have an internal OpenAI project with an Anthropic employee?” he told the Times.If the goal is to compete in mathematics, there are few bigger trophies than solving a Millennium Prize problem. The seven problems, set out by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000, are widely considered among the most formidable challenges in the field. Each carries a $1 million bounty for whoever solves it. Many had already endured decades of intense scrutiny by the time the prizes were established.
In the quarter-century since, only one — the Poincaré conjecture, a topological problem concerning three-dimensional spheres — has fallen.For an AI company looking to prove that its models are the best at mathematics, then, they are irresistible targets. To Buckmaster and many other mathematicians The Verge spoke to, that helps explain why OpenAI moved so ferociously when it heard others were closing in — particularly once a rival AI company appeared to be involved.For Buckmaster, the episode reinforced something he already believed strongly from a previous spell collaborating with Google DeepMind: “All these tech people are obsessed” with solving big famous problems and are “obsessed with scooping,” he said. “Its all about competition.”In that world, Tristan Buckmaster said there is an intense fixation on prestige, fame, being first, and being seen to be first. “That’s the only currency,” he said.He said what often gets “lost” when companies race to solve famous problems are the mathematicians themselves — not just the people whose accumulated work makes these breakthroughs possible, but the reasons they do mathematics to begin with. Yes, some may pursue prestige, but most are simply not trophy hunters. Andras Juhasz, a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, described mathematics as an elegant discipline that is part science, part art, with many different motivations driving those working there. “Often there is no immediate practical application,” he said. “They do it because it’s beautiful.
They enjoy it. It’s the sense of discovery. It’s natural.”Unlike classroom-level mathematical exercises, frontier mathematics rarely has a prescribed
