Terence Tao leads mathematicians' association in a joint boycott of OpenAI

The tension between mathematics and a leading AI company has gone public. Terence Tao, a Fields Medal winner, is leading the Association for Human Mathematicians (AHM) in a joint statement urging mathematicians worldwide to stop collaborating with OpenAI and to boycott the company.

The statement takes direct aim at a recent OpenAI release. AHM describes OpenAI — currently facing litigation over alleged plagiarism, copyright infringement and trademark dilution — as having published a batch of manuscripts claiming to contain solutions to well-known mathematical problems.

AHM's language is blunt: “Nobody asked you to solve these proofs.” The group criticizes OpenAI for releasing a large set of machine-generated proof documents at once, arguing it is not research at all but a display of compute power.

The statement also points to a prior consultative arrangement. OpenAI had set up a mathematics and AI advisory group with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, promising deep collaboration with the math community. AHM argues the group's advice was ignored: its first report warned that frontier AI companies should not test hard mathematical problems on internal models, yet OpenAI went ahead.

At the heart of the dispute is a question of research culture. AHM says mathematicians hold a vision of progress rooted in the history and norms of their discipline, and it rejects OpenAI's claim that the release advanced mathematics, urging mathematicians and the public to be skeptical of the value of this publication model.

Tao's long-running warning about “proof indigestion” is now playing out. As he puts it, once a problem is declared solved it can never return to unsolved, and merely knowing that an answer exists can pollute other research paths that might have yielded deeper insight.

The clash also raises worries about the academic ecosystem: no peer review, no readable human logic and little explanation of prior work, with some younger scholars afraid to disclose their research directions for fear of being scooped by large models.

Not every leading scholar agrees. Turing Award winner Yann LeCun has publicly pushed back, arguing that mathematics is entering a new era in which formal proofs will be heavily automated and the focus will shift to developing new concepts, abstractions and conjectures.

What to watch: how this organized boycott by mathematicians affects collaboration between AI companies and academia, and whether OpenAI responds formally to the statement. Similar friction over the boundaries of AI in research is likely to continue.