Caltech to Host First Research-Grade Math AI Hackathon with Anthropic and OpenAI

Caltech is teaming up with Anthropic and OpenAI to host what's billed as the world's first AI hackathon for research-level mathematics, the Caltech Mathathon, scheduled for October 30 – November 1, 2026. Participating teams will have 40 hours to solve, understand, and present an open mathematical problem; the 100 selected teams will share a total of $2 million in compute credits and must defend their work orally before a judging panel of top mathematicians. Applications are now open.

Confirmed

• The event runs three days: Friday features an AI agent workshop led by Anthropic introducing mathematicians to the latest techniques; Saturday and Sunday are the hackathon-style problem-solving; Sunday evening brings oral presentations to an expert jury.
• Participants include IMO/IOI medalists and Annals-level authors—top mathematicians—with roughly 100 teams recruited globally by the organizers.
• The organizers emphasize three rules: fairness (admission by mathematical ability, travel costs covered, all backgrounds welcome), transparency (all AI conversation logs recorded and open-sourced during the event), and understanding (participants must present results orally and answer judges' questions).

Why it matters

• This is the first time leading AI labs have joined forces with a university to throw frontier models at open math problems at scale—effectively a concentrated stress test of "AI-assisted research-grade mathematics."
• The full recording and open-sourcing of dialogue logs gives academia auditable public data for assessing AI's real role in mathematical discovery.

2026-09-05 ~ 2026-09-05 · 20 related posts

• [source] World's first math hackathon with Anthropic and OpenAI: 40 hours, $2M compute — _sathvikr · 2026-09-05
• Three-day math AI hackathon with Anthropic will open-source all AI chat logs — _sathvikr · 2026-09-05
• Caltech Mathathon: first research-level math hackathon, $2M+ AI credits, 40 hours — _sathvikr · 2026-09-05
• [source] Caltech hosts first math research hackathon: 40 hours, $2M compute, open conjectures — _sathvikr · 2026-09-05
• AI math event: main track judged by independent academics, with sponsor tracks from Cognition and Cloudflare — _sathvikr · 2026-09-05
• AI contest backed by OpenAI, DARPA, Cognition pays for solving open math problems — _sathvikr · 2026-09-05
• Caltech AI Mathathon Draws Sponsors Including Anthropic, OpenAI, and DARPA — _sathvikr · 2026-09-05
• AI hackathon puts open math problems before independent academic judges, with tracks from Cognition, Cloudflare and more — _sathvikr · 2026-09-05
• Cognition teams with OpenAI and Anthropic on first math hackathon with $2M compute — DevinAI · 2026-09-05

11 near-duplicate retellings: _sathvikr · _sathvikr · DevinAI · _sathvikr · _sathvikr · _sathvikr · _sathvikr · _sathvikr · _sathvikr · _sathvikr · _sathvikr