Physicist says Anthropic's Claude scooped his team, mimicking their methods and format
KyleCranmer · x · 2026-09-26
Kyle Cranmer (UW-Madison) discovered his team's research direction — including collaborator Lance Dixon — was scooped by Anthropic's Claude. In an addendum to his post "How does it feel to be scooped by a machine?", Dixon, who verified the result under NDA, notes Claude used essentially the methods his collaborators developed over years and even presented the solution in the same format they had established. Cranmer says he isn't entirely surprised but wishes the team had the time and resources to finish. A rare public instance of human researchers being beaten to a scientific result by an AI model.
Related event: Claude Breaks Nine-Loop Physics Record, Scooping Human Team(27 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- UK's new AI Economics Institute hiring up to 15 research economists — TaniaBabina · 2026-11-11
- Not Boring: the three arguments that AI isn't a bubble are exactly how bubbles form — Not Boring (Packy McCormick) · 2026-11-11
- Viral post: five years of 'maybe next year,' then 2026 arrived — hey_abusiddik · 2026-11-11
- Jeremy Howard: LLMs "cosplay understanding," like the man in Searle's Chinese room — Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-11-11
- 'Chat with your data' misses the point — people want a smart coworker — vboykis · 2026-11-11
- Ben Todd: AI task time horizons appear superexponential in AECI, not just revenue — ben_j_todd · 2026-11-11