The Fields Medal is the most prestigious prize in mathematics, the equivalent of the Nobel. When 25 recipients of this award co-sign an open letter, it is no small matter.
The letter, published on mathandai.org, argues that AI labs are threatening the intellectual work of the mathematical community. Specifically, labs tend to publish solutions to famous problems “in haste, without taking the time to write properly, isolate novel methods, and cite related work by others.”
The trigger for the letter was an incident last week. Professor Tristan Buckmaster at NYU accused OpenAI of pressuring him not to credit a collaborator working at Anthropic for their contribution in solving an important mathematical problem.
He also questioned whether OpenAI used Codex, its AI coding tool, to generate its own solution over the course of a single marathon inference weekend. OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the Millennium Prize Problems, but the solution remains unverified.
This week, OpenAI withdrew sponsorship for a mathematics event at Caltech after facing criticism from researchers at the university. This is an unusual response, signaling that tensions have escalated to an irreconcilable degree.
What worries many mathematicians most is not that AI can solve problems, but the misaligned incentive structure. When a frontier lab spots a promising direction, it can spend tens of millions of dollars running inference to “beat” the original researcher in just a few days. This creates a perverse incentive: instead of sharing ideas, mathematicians will keep them secret to avoid having them “taken” by AI.
The letter also raises a deeper concern: whether data from using Codex is being fed back into OpenAI’s models. If so, it means mathematicians are inadvertently training their own competitor.
The Leiden Declaration, issued in June 2026 by a mathematics working group, raised similar questions and offered recommendations for research institutions and policymakers.
This is not just an issue for mathematics. As the letter states: “The issues facing the mathematical community parallel those experienced across other scientific and creative fields, offering a preview of what humanity as a whole may encounter.”