Mathematician cracks Navier–Stokes with Codex, then OpenAI agents did it in 88 hours

rubenhassid · x · 2026-09-13

NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster paid for his own ChatGPT Codex subscription and worked with Levent Alpöge (an Anthropic employee doing this on his own time) on Navier–Stokes, a Millennium Prize problem. They had a result on August 15 using Codex.

On September 1, OpenAI heard a rumor someone had cracked it and pointed ten thousand agents at the problem — 88 hours later, OpenAI had solved it too.

Buckmaster asked the key question: had the model been trained on his sessions? OpenAI's research chief said no human opened the chats and no agent looked at his data, raising trust questions about whether AI companies read paid users' conversations.

Related event: AI Solves Navier–Stokes, Sparking Math Community Backlash(2 posts)→

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