Twenty-five Fields Medalists sign an open letter warning AI labs are threatening mathematicians' work

Twenty-five leading mathematicians have signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they race one another to solve famous math problems. Every signatory has been awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics.

The letter landed in the same week that NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of pressuring him not to credit a collaborator who works for Anthropic for solving an important math problem. He also wondered whether their work with Codex had been used to produce the company's own ground-breaking proof over a marathon weekend of inference.

The dispute escalated on Thursday, when OpenAI withdrew its sponsorship of a math event at CalTech after the company was criticized by researchers at the university. In the space of a few days, the tension between AI labs and the mathematical community has moved from technical debate to open conflict.

The signatories' central worry is attribution and intelligibility. "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, noting that OpenAI's proof remains unverified. "As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions," the letter warns.

The letter also makes the case for transmission: without willing mathematicians who develop those ideas and integrate them into the mathematical canon, "AI-conceived ideas would never become fully alive and the crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost."

The anxiety runs deeper than credit. With other mathematicians growing paranoid about whether their Codex use was in turn fed into OpenAI's new models, there is real fear that the culture of open research will be threatened. If a frontier lab sees a useful path to a discovery, it can spend tens of millions of dollars using LLMs to beat the original researchers to a proof — an incentive that rewards secrecy.

The open letter follows the Leiden Declaration, released by a working group of mathematicians in June. That document similarly grapples with how LLM proofs will change their work, and offers recommendations for mathematicians, institutions, and policymakers.

The signatories frame their own predicament as an early warning. The value in math, they argue, is not just the proofs and who gets credit, but the intellectual super-structure that nourishes students, finds new questions and ideas, and integrates them into broader human civilization. "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," they wrote. As TechCrunch puts it: if you don't care about the cutthroat world of high-stakes mathematical proofs, your field of interest is next.