OpenAI touts math breakthrough. Mathematicians dispute credit

Sept. 8, 2026Updated Sept. 9, 2026, 12:14 a.m. ET

OpenAI announced on Sept. 8 that researchers using an unreleased internal model had solved a historic math problem. But the claimed breakthrough comes amid allegations from two mathematicians who say the company may have built on their work without proper credit.

The Navier-Stokes equations are considered one of the hardest in math, classified in 2000 by the Clay Mathematics Institute as one of seven "Millennium Prize Problems." The institute offers $1 million to whoever can solve it, and until now, only one of the seven problems had been solved.

New York University professor Tristan Buckmaster said in a Sept. 8 statement that he and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge have spent much of the past year working on the Navier-Stokes problem as independent researchers. After OpenAI learned of their progress, Buckmaster alleged the company raced to solve the problem before them using a similar route.

OpenAI called the researchers' claims "categorically false" in an email to USA TODAY. The company's public statement adds that OpenAI researchers "did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem."