Update, Sept. 28: The student organizers have since redesigned the event around the theme “Old Problems, New Proofs,” moved it to Nov. 13-15 and dropped sponsorship from developers of proprietary AI models, according to a joint statement signed by organizers and two authors of the open letter.
OpenAI has pulled its sponsorship of the Caltech Mathathon, a student-run event where teams of mathematicians were to use large language models on research problems. OpenAI research lead Dan Roberts announced the move on X on Thursday. “We recognize that the rapid progress of AI in mathematics is disruptive,” he wrote. “We’re looking to engage with the math community more on the best way to integrate this technology and communicate its impacts.”
The decision followed an open letter released Wednesday by current and former Caltech mathematicians, who wrote that the event “is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community.” According to Gizmodo, the letter argued that AI firms have “advanced a campaign of scientific misinformation about the goals of mathematical research” to advertise their products, and that AI-driven “slop mathematics” amounts to research misconduct.
What the event offered
Each of the 100 teams gets 40 hours and $20,000 in tokens, with the first round starting Oct. 30. OpenAI and Anthropic had promised a combined $2 million in credits. A Mathathon spokesperson told Gizmodo that “OpenAI specifically sponsored 10k of the 20k” per team, that organizers were in talks with other firms to cover the gap, and that “we do not anticipate that this will affect the event in any substantial way.”
A wider dispute over AI proofs
The sponsorship fight landed in the same week as OpenAI’s claim that it had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, which mathematicians have disputed and which remains unverified. That announcement also set off a public dispute with NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster. As TechCrunch reported, Buckmaster accused OpenAI of pressuring him not to credit his collaborator Levent Alpöge, who works at Anthropic, and questioned whether the company had used their work with its Codex tool to produce its own proof. The New York Times covered the allegations in detail.
Separately, 25 mathematicians who have each won the Fields Medal signed a letter arguing that AI labs racing to solve famous problems threaten mathematicians’ intellectual work. “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. “As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions.”
That letter follows the Leiden Declaration, a June document from a working group of mathematicians with recommendations for researchers, institutions and policymakers on how proofs produced by LLMs will change the field.
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