NYU mathematician accuses OpenAI of rushing to claim Navier-Stokes proof and dropping his collaborator

Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University, issued a public statement around September 8, revealing that he and Levent Alpöge, a researcher at Anthropic, spent roughly a year studying variants of the Euler, Boussinesq, and Navier-Stokes equations, heavily using tools such as Claude and Codex to generate candidate ideas, ultimately cracking several major fluid dynamics problems within about a month. The Navier-Stokes problem is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, carries a $1 million reward, and is second in fame only to the Riemann Hypothesis and P vs NP.

Confirmed

• Buckmaster's statement contains two accusations: first, that after OpenAI learned the two were on the verge of publishing their proof first, it attempted to rush out similar results ahead of them; second, that OpenAI demanded his collaborator be removed from the author list on the grounds that he worked at Anthropic. IgorCarron relayed that the episode has been called one of the ugliest incidents ever to come out of a frontier lab — the issue lying not in the mathematics itself, but in OpenAI's conduct after learning someone else was about to beat them to it.
• According to eyishazyer, after the dispute escalated, Buckmaster accused OpenAI of cutting corners and refused to answer related questions.

Unconfirmed

• OpenAI's response to the accusations, as well as the actual content and correctness of its "rushed" version of the results, are not provided in the post.
• The specific mathematical details of both sides' proofs are not presented in the material, and there is no third-party ruling on who was first.

Why It Matters

• This is a rare, high-profile case of a priority dispute between an AI lab and academia: AI involvement in research is already accelerating mathematical breakthroughs, while issues around lab competition and authorship norms are coming to the fore.
• Researcher Afinetheorem commented that in an era of AI-accelerated research, "word-of-mouth about an idea" may be enough for someone to crack a problem first, and secretive research may become the norm; he argued that fairness means letting the original authors write up their results at their own pace.

2026-09-08 ~ 2026-09-08 · 6 related posts

Full story(2 episodes)→

• Episode 1: OpenAI Accused of Scooping Navier-Stokes Work; Bubeck Denies Allegations(2026-09-08, 19 posts)
• Episode 2: NYU mathematician accuses OpenAI of rushing to claim Navier-Stokes proof and dropping his collaborator(2026-09-08, 6 posts)

• [source] NYU mathematician says LLMs helped crack fluid blowup problems in a month, accuses OpenAI of scoop and authorship pressure — dotey · 2026-09-08
• [source] Mathematician's statement alleges OpenAI moved against researchers about to beat it to a proof — IgorCarron · 2026-09-08
• OpenAI accused of scooping mathematicians on Navier-Stokes breakthrough, pressuring co-author cut — burny_tech · 2026-09-08
• Researcher predicts more secrecy as AI makes rumor-speed math breakthroughs the norm — Afinetheorem · 2026-09-08
• [source] Mathematician alleges OpenAI's Navier-Stokes proof followed his work; Bubeck calls claims false — eyishazyer · 2026-09-08
• Insider claims OpenAI's math breakthrough relied on NYU and Anthropic researchers using Claude — eyishazyer · 2026-09-08