Twenty-five of the world's most accomplished mathematicians have put their names to an open letter warning that AI laboratories are endangering their intellectual labor as these companies race against one another to crack celebrated mathematical problems. Every person who signed the letter holds a Fields Medal, widely regarded as the highest honor in the field.

This week, NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster publicly accused OpenAI of applying pressure on him to withhold credit from a collaborator employed by Anthropic for resolving a significant math problem. He also raised the question of whether the company had drawn on their work with Codex to generate its own landmark proof during an exhausting weekend-long inference run. On Thursday, OpenAI pulled its sponsorship of a mathematics event at CalTech following criticism from researchers at the university.

While AI models capable of solving the world's great unsolved mathematical challenges could benefit all of humanity, the letter's signatories contend that this will only hold true if the mathematical community—and eventually the wider world—can comprehend and communicate those solutions. "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 still has not been verified. "As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions. Moreover, without the willing mathematicians who must take care of their development and integration into the mathematical canon, AI-conceived ideas would never become fully alive and the crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost."

With other mathematicians growing suspicious and questioning whether their own Codex usage was subsequently fed into OpenAI's new models, there is genuine concern that the culture of open research is under threat. Today, when frontier labs identify a promising route to a discovery, they can deploy tens of millions of dollars in LLM compute to reach a proof ahead of the original researchers—a dynamic that will push mathematicians toward secrecy.

This letter comes on the heels of the Leiden Declaration, published by a working group of mathematicians in June. That document likewise confronts how LLM-generated proofs will reshape their profession, and puts forward a series of recommendations for mathematicians, institutions, and policymakers. As with software engineering and other domains where AI tools are transforming workflows, mathematicians locate their justification in the work surrounding the work: the worth of mathematics lies not merely in proofs and who receives credit, but in the intellectual superstructure that nurtures students, uncovers new questions and ideas, and weaves them into the broader fabric of human civilization.

And if the ruthless world of high-stakes mathematical proofs doesn't especially concern you, keep in mind: your own field is next in line. "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," they wrote.