Before Tuesday's announcement, competing researchers challenged OpenAI's account of how the work unfolded. OpenAI said its effort began September 1 after it heard a rumor, which it later connected to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After completing its own proof and Lean verification on September 6, OpenAI said it contacted the two researchers to offer a joint announcement, at which point it learned their work addressed a related but distinct problem — the forced Euler equations, not Navier-Stokes. OpenAI said it recognizes the priority of their work on that problem.