Math's Top Prize Winners Say OpenAI Is Stealing Their Work

Twenty-five mathematicians who have won the Fields Medal — often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics — signed an open letter this week warning that AI companies are threatening their profession. Their complaint isn't that AI can solve hard math problems. It's that companies like OpenAI are racing to announce solutions to famous problems without properly crediting the humans involved, verifying the answers, or explaining how they work. One NYU professor, Tristan Buckmaster, accused OpenAI of pressuring him not to credit a collaborator who works at rival Anthropic for solving an important problem.

The feud escalated fast. OpenAI withdrew its sponsorship of a math event at CalTech after researchers there criticized the company. Mathematicians are also growing paranoid that their own use of OpenAI's Codex tool — an AI that helps write code — is being fed back into the company's models without their knowledge. And because AI labs can now spend tens of millions of dollars to beat researchers to a discovery, the letter warns that scientists will start keeping secrets instead of sharing ideas openly.

Why should you care if you're not a mathematician? Because the same thing is coming for your field. The letter points out that math is simply the first profession to face this: if AI can produce results faster than humans can understand or check them, then credit, careers, and the shared knowledge that makes a field work all start to break down. The authors argue that the value of any profession isn't just its final products — it's the whole human system around them: training students, asking new questions, and passing knowledge forward.