25 Fields Medalists warn AI labs are threatening mathematical research culture

Twenty-five leading mathematicians signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they race to one-up each other with solutions to famous math problems. Each signatory has been awarded the Fields Medal, considered the most prestigious prize in mathematics.

This week, NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of pressuring him not to credit a collaborator who works for Anthropic for solving an important math problem, and wondered whether the company had used their work with Codex to produce its own proof over a marathon weekend of inference. On Thursday, OpenAI withdrew its sponsorship of a math event at Caltech after researchers at the university criticized the company.

While AI models’ ability to solve outstanding mathematical challenges could benefit humanity, the letter’s signatories argue that will only hold if those solutions can be understood and communicated by the math community and, ultimately, the rest of the world. “Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others,” they wrote — and OpenAI’s proof remains unverified. “As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions.”

With other mathematicians growing wary that their own Codex use might be fed into OpenAI’s future models, there’s real concern the culture of open research could be threatened. Today, if frontier labs see a path to a discovery, they can spend tens of millions of dollars using AI models to beat the original researchers to a proof — a dynamic that could incentivize secrecy. This letter follows the Leiden Declaration, released by a working group of mathematicians in June, which also addresses how LLM-generated proofs will change the field and offers recommendations for mathematicians, institutions, and policymakers.

As with software engineering and other fields where AI tools are reshaping workflows, mathematicians argue the value of their discipline isn’t just the proofs and who gets credit, but the broader intellectual structure that trains students, generates new questions, and integrates ideas into human knowledge more broadly. “The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing, and indicate issues that all of humanity might face: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place,” the letter states.

Why it matters

The dispute signals that AI’s push into elite scientific fields is straining norms around credit and verification well beyond mathematics — a preview of tensions likely to surface in any research discipline AI models start to compete in directly.