Altman responds to Navier-Stokes proof feud: OpenAI offered rival team to go first
sama · x · 2026-09-09
Sam Altman published a lengthy response to the dispute over OpenAI's AI-assisted Navier-Stokes proof, saying the rival team (Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic employee Levent Alpöge) refused to coordinate throughout:
- OpenAI initially believed both teams had solved the problem and wanted a joint release.
- Upon learning the other team had only solved the Euler case, OpenAI offered to let them go first, concede the prize, and make Tristan lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI's proof.
- Altman says the same couldn't be offered to Alpöge as an Anthropic employee unwilling to communicate, and that his team faced "unfounded accusations of plagiarism."
- In the quoted post, Sebastien Bubeck clarifies a leaked screenshot was a good-faith coordination attempt and that he never asked for Alpöge to be removed from authorship.
The feud offers a rare look at priority disputes between frontier labs over a major mathematical result.
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