AI
OpenAI researcher allegedly pressured mathematician to drop Anthropic co
Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster has publicly accused OpenAI of pressuring and threatening him after learning about his AI-assisted progress
Key takeaways
- OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck pressured Tristan Buckmaster to remove Anthropic co-author Levent Alpöge from their math breakthrough paper.
- Bubeck threatened Buckmaster's career when Buckmaster rejected proposals to exclude Alpöge or delay publication.
- OpenAI did not see any of Buckmaster and Alpöge's work until it was released publicly.
- OpenAI's internal model solved the Navier-Stokes equations using 10,000 coordinated AI agents in 88 hours.
- OpenAI's internal model solves nearly three times as many open math problems as GPT-6 Astra.
Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster has publicly accused OpenAI of pressuring and threatening him after learning about his AI-assisted progress on the Navier-Stokes equations. Buckmaster and his co-author Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, used Codex and Claude to achieve major breakthroughs. Buckmaster claims OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck pressured him to remove Alpöge as a co-author because of his Anthropic employment and threatened his career when he refused. OpenAI has denied the allegations, stating they did not see the work before its public release, and has published its own Navier-Stokes results generated by 10,000 coordinated AI agents using an internal model more capable than GPT-6 Astra.
The dispute highlights intense competition between AI labs and raises concerns over training data privacy.
In their words
“If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice.”
“I am stating it because the alternative is to let a sequence of announcements say something I know to be false.”
By the numbers
- 10,000
- Coordinated AI agents used to produce OpenAI's proof
- 88
- Hours taken by OpenAI's agents to produce the proof
- $500,000
- Compute cost for o3 to hit 87.5% on ARC-AGI
- $20
- Cost for Astra to match the same benchmark performance
- 3x
- Open math problems solved by internal model vs Astra
How it unfolded
- Buckmaster and Alpöge achieve several math breakthroughs using AI
- OpenAI begins training new model with advanced math capabilities
- Buckmaster proactively contacts OpenAI mathematician to clarify collaboration
- OpenAI achieves final Lean-formalized Navier-Stokes solution
Why this matters
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OpenAI reserves the right to train models on Codex interactions, raising concerns that Buckmaster's drafts informed OpenAI's model.
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Common questions
- What happened with Tristan Buckmaster?
- OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck pressured Tristan Buckmaster to remove Anthropic co-author Levent Alpöge from their math breakthrough paper.
- Where can I read the original report?
- Read the full report at The Decoder.
