OpenAI announces that it has demonstrated a variant of the Navier-Stokes equations; mathematician Tristan Buckmaster accuses the company of having wanted to dismiss his co-author because he works at Anthropic.
On August 15, 2026, Tristan Buckmaster (New York University) and Levent Alpöge, attached to Anthropic, established that Euler's equations can explode in finite time, extending a forcing method developed by Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa. The result had not yet been published when it reached OpenAI's ears. Over the weekend, a team led by Sébastien Bubeck, head of mathematics at OpenAI, pushed the argument to the complete Navier-Stokes equations.
It is what happened next that is controversial. Buckmaster publicly claims that OpenAI offered him two options: publish his result on Euler the day before OpenAI's publication of the Navier-Stokes result, or write the second article on his own without citing Alpöge as a co-author, on the grounds that Alpöge is employed by Anthropic. He also reports that when he threatened to make the case public, he received a response warning him against "ruining his career".
On the mathematical background, the proof concerns the forced variant of the equations, which does not fall within the criteria of the Clay Mathematics Institute's million-dollar prize; OpenAI has also indicated that it will not claim this award. The episode illustrates above all the difficulty of attributing scientific merit when competing laboratories have swarms of agents work on results that have not yet been published.
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