Claude autonomously formalizes Fermat's Last Theorem in Lean over 11 days
alex_verem · x · 2026-09-06
Anthropic has shared the first complete computer-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, written in Lean by Claude working largely autonomously over 11 days.
- Context: Wiles's 1995 proof ran 129 pages and took months to verify; since 2024 Kevin Buzzard has led a community effort at Imperial College London to formalize it in Lean
- Anthropic researcher Tianyi Peng set out to test Claude on the task; the model produced 13 million lines of Lean and proved 29,500 intermediate theorems
- Buzzard called it an extraordinary autoformalization achievement; Anthropic also reflects on what this means for research mathematics
Related event: Claude Completes First Formalized Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem(43 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Gary Marcus Gives Limited Endorsement to PauseAI, Podcast Incoming — GaryMarcus · 2026-09-06
- We're now in a 'trust can't verify' era, argues Kolt Regaskes — koltregaskes · 2026-09-06
- Sam Altman: Curing Cancer With AI Is 'Not Enough', Industry Should Aim Higher — SydSteyerhart · 2026-09-06
- Andrew Ng: prompting will be dead in 6 months, graphs are replacing it — nikola_mr64990 · 2026-09-06
- Larry Ellison: A lot of Oracle's code is now written by its AI models, not people — r0ck3t23 · 2026-09-06
- AI-risk researcher: >50% LLM-generated text is a good heuristic for skipping bad papers — sethlazar · 2026-09-06