OpenAI's Navier-Stokes claim under fire: did Codex lift two mathematicians' approach?

ExamImmediate8956 · reddit · 2026-09-20

OpenAI claimed around September 8 to have solved the existence and smoothness problem of the Navier-Stokes equations, sparking immediate controversy.

The backstory: NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster and mathematician Levent Alpoge were independently working on a subset of the problem — the Euler equation, which removes viscosity — and had used Codex and Claude sessions to accelerate their work. Their initial approach reportedly matches the one OpenAI published.

That raises two serious questions: did Codex misuse users' session content, and was that data used to train OpenAI's own models? The poster covers the story in detail in a linked YouTube video.

Related event: OpenAI's Navier-Stokes Claim Sparks Accusations of Borrowing a Mathematician's Ideas(2 posts)→

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