OpenAI has come under fire from mathematicians for its handling of collaboration and attribution in AI-generated proofs. Twenty-five mathematicians, including Fields Medalists, signed an open letter accusing the company of pressuring researchers to withhold credit for work involving Anthropic. The letter highlights concerns about OpenAI’s use of Codex to potentially produce groundbreaking proofs without proper verification.
The letter also notes that AI-generated solutions to mathematical problems are often announced hastily, leaving little time for proper documentation, citation of prior work, and integration into the mathematical canon. This has raised serious questions about attribution and plagiarism, with mathematicians fearing that the culture of open research is being undermined.
OpenAI recently withdrew its sponsorship of a math event at CalTech after being criticized by university researchers. The company has faced growing paranoia among mathematicians, who are questioning whether their use of Codex has been fed back into OpenAI’s models. This dynamic is seen as incentivizing secrecy over collaboration.
"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," said Tristan Buckmaster, a NYU professor.
The letter warns that 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.
The letter follows the Leiden Declaration, released by a working group of mathematicians in June. That document also grapples with the ways that LLM proofs will change their work and offers a set of recommendations for mathematicians, institutions, and policymakers.
The letter emphasizes that the value in math lies not just in the proofs and who gets credit, but in the intellectual super-structure that nourishes students and integrates ideas into broader human civilization.
OpenAI did not comment on the specific allegations raised in the letter, and the issue remains unresolved. The letter warns that if frontier labs see a useful path to a discovery, they can spend tens of millions of dollars using LLMs to beat the original researchers to a proof — a dynamic that will incentivize secrecy.
Source: techcrunch
