OpenAI researcher allegedly pressured mathematician to drop Anthropic co-author from math breakthrough paper
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Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges that an OpenAI researcher pressured him to remove his co-author, Levent Alpöge, from a collaborative paper detailing AI-assisted progress on the Navier-Stokes equations. According to Buckmaster, OpenAI executive Sébastien Bubeck repeatedly insisted on excluding Alpöge due to his employment at rival firm Anthropic and allegedly warned Buckmaster against jeopardizing his academic career if he refused. The controversy emerged after rumors of the mathematicians' breakthrough reached OpenAI, prompting aggressive outreach and claims that the company had independently generated a lengthy proof using a similar unconventional methodology. In response to the allegations, OpenAI denied accessing the researchers' drafts prior to publication and emphasized that its own solution relied on a fundamentally different approach executed by thousands of coordinated AI agents. While Buckmaster clarified that he is not alleging intellectual property theft, he released his account to counter potential misrepresentations regarding the timeline and nature of the discovery. Meanwhile, industry observers have highlighted the rapidly decreasing computational costs required for such advanced mathematical reasoning, noting that high-level AI problem-solving may soon become widely accessible.
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