Nearly 500 mathematicians sign open letter slamming Mathathon over $2M in Anthropic and OpenAI AI credits
ctjlewis · x · 2026-09-10
An open letter about the Mathathon — an AI math competition — has gathered nearly 500 signatories, including serious mathematicians from Caltech, Princeton, MIT, Harvard and other institutions.
- The core complaint: Anthropic and OpenAI will supply participants with $2 million in AI credits, and critics argue that having model vendors directly sponsor a competition designed to evaluate those very models amounts to a conflict of interest — bluntly, research misconduct.
- The letter takes aim at organizers including Tony Yue Yu and Sergei Gukov, questioning the event's independence under vendor sponsorship.
- The episode exposes a structural tension in the emerging "benchmark-as-competition" space: who pays, and who gets evaluated.
Related event: Hundreds of Mathematicians Sign Open Letter Against Caltech's AI Mathathon(9 posts)→
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