Twenty-five Fields Medal winners have signed an open letter stating that AI labs are threatening mathematicians' intellectual labor by rushing to announce solutions to famous mathematical problems. Each signatory has received the highest award in the field.

The letter states: Solutions are often announced hastily, leaving no time to write complete papers, separate new methods, and cite previous work; this raises issues of attribution and plagiarism in all creative professions. Without mathematicians willing to write new ideas into mathematical classics and complete the human teaching chain, ideas conceived by AI cannot truly come to life. The signatories believe that if models can solve outstanding problems, it can benefit humanity, provided that the solutions can be understood and disseminated by the mathematical community. Public reports mention signatories including Terence Tao, Artur Avila, and Manjul Bhargava.

The trigger was a priority conflict that occurred in the same week. NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of pressuring him not to thank a collaborator at Anthropic and questioned whether the company was leveraging their work with Codex to produce its own breakthrough proof through marathon reasoning. OpenAI subsequently published a complete proof regarding the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness Millennium Prize problem, claiming it was completed by an unpublished next-generation model in about a week, consuming approximately 300 billion output tokens. Buckmaster's team had previously announced three proofs advancing towards this problem. OpenAI also withdrew sponsorship after facing criticism from campus researchers during a mathematics event at Caltech. In June, the Leiden Declaration had already called for mathematicians, institutions, and governments to regulate the use of AI in research, receiving endorsements from the International Mathematical Union and others.

Labs treat unverified proofs as advertisements for their capabilities; mathematicians view unfinished manuscripts and citations as conditions for the survival of the discipline. Each Millennium Prize problem has a reward of $1 million, but the open letter contests who has the right to announce and who must write the methods into verifiable texts.

In market mechanisms, this is a struggle for reputation and narrative training, not prize settlement. The buyers are model companies announcing "solved" on social platforms; the sellers are the mathematical community that still controls peer review, citations, and classroom teaching. The beneficiaries are labs that can turn famous conjectures into evaluation and financing stories; the pressured are scholars who must verify after hot announcements but do not receive computational budget. Funds flow from computational bills to model release events, while verification costs are left to universities.

Supplementary structure: OpenAI's proof is still described in the letter as insufficiently verified. There is also a joint statement criticizing the use of large models to generate unverifiable mathematical garbage for students at Caltech's "Mathematics Marathon."

Source: Public Information