Claude Works Autonomously for 11 Days to Produce First Computer-Checked Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem
satnam6502 · x · 2026-09-07
Anthropic has shared the first complete computer-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Claude worked largely autonomously over 11 days, writing the proof in Lean — 13 million lines of code and 29,500 intermediate theorems along the way.
- Wiles's original 1995 proof ran 129 pages and took months to verify
- A community effort led by Kevin Buzzard (Imperial College) had been formalizing FLT in Lean since 2024
- Anthropic researcher Tianyi Peng (Columbia) set out to test Claude on the task; the result exceeded expectations
- Buzzard called it an "extraordinary autoformalization achievement"
The post also discusses what this could mean for the future of research mathematics.
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