Anthropic's internal Claude model claims 2^o(n) 3-SAT algorithm, purportedly refuting the ETH
ctjlewis · x · 2026-10-31
Hexagon, the math collaboration platform, has received its first big-lab contribution: Anthropic's "A 2^o(n) Time Algorithm for 3-SAT," claiming to refute the Exponential Time Hypothesis and even solving the harder #3-SAT counting version, formalized in Lean 4.
The provenance statement is striking: the core algorithm was found Oct 16 by an internal Claude research model with 14M output tokens and no human input; Anthropic researchers only improved the presentation. It also notes an internal OpenAI model concurrently claims a similar proof.
The paper is flagged "Primarily AI-generated, human understanding: some parts" — a landmark case of AI driving frontier math research.
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