I would like to clarify a few things:
1) The screenshot is my reaching out to Levent to coordinate our releases. I hope it’s clear from the message that we came in with the best possible intentions.
2) I never ever asked for Levent to be removed from authorship of his own work (as indicated by my text). I was surprised to learn during the call with Tristan that they had only solved Euler and not Navier-Stokes; after learning this we brainstormed possible paths forward. One option we discussed was that Tristan could be the lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. It is in that context that I said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” because I felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work. Importantly it was admitted that internal Anthropic models had been used in their proof of Euler blowup; I therefore felt I could not consider Levent to be an independent academic. Another option I wanted to propose (but got cut short) is to offer access to our internal model so that they could try to finish their proof and bridge the gap between Euler and NS. Again I did not know how to navigate giving access to internal OpenAI IP to an Anthropic employee.
3) To reiterate it plainly: as my text clearly indicates, and as I said during our call, OpenAI's intention was to do everything possible to celebrate their mathematical achievements and the heroic efforts that they made on Euler. In the call I was immediately met with a litany of slander, including direct threats that if we were to announce Navier-Stokes he would immediately go to the press with a barrage of unfounded accusations. I refuted all these accusations but he replied “there is nothing you can do, I simply do not trust you”. I was confused why one would turn an incredible source for celebration (of their achievements!) into such bickering, which is when I said that I did not understand why one would risk their career [over unfounded accusations]. Genuinely, at that moment, I was trying to care for him and do a last ditch attempt to get a chance to give them all the credits that they deserve. I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey. (I should say that I retracted them on the spot by the way.)
4) Overall, on a personal level, it was incredibly difficult to have these conversations. Levent refused to attend any of the meetings despite my repeated asking. As Sholto Douglas said, there will need to be coordination between Anthropic and OpenAI in the future; I felt I was doing a proxy negotiation with Anthropic while the Anthropic employee refused to directly participate.
Sebastien Bubeck
@SebastienBubeck
Some more technical points:
(a) We began working on the Millennium problems due to viral twitter rumors that Anthropic had resolved 2 Millenium problems. Our aim was to see whether our system was also capable of this impressive feat, especially given our excitement regarding the large recent capability increases of our internal model detailed in our blog post.
(b) We did not see any of their work until they released it publicly last night. One can in hindsight see that our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced). It is also worth noting that our team consisted largely of mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists with the deepest roots in academia and respect for the stature and integrity of the Millennium problems.
(c) Levent reached out unprompted to an OpenAI employee on Wednesday. Due to his numerous posts on Twitter (S^6, Jacobian, Hadamard…) which appear to represent Anthropic and use Anthropic internal models, we believed that their project was, at least in part, an Anthropic project. Additionally recent further tweets by Levent (“augustus mirabilis”) led us to believe that they had solved at least 1 Millennium problem and would likely release it soon.
(d) Regarding the level of human involvement on our end: although a group of people was involved in our efforts, we collectively had no research-level expertise in fluid dynamics and the Navier-Stokes problem, and therefore were unable to meaningfully contribute to the mathematical content. We involved several people in order to initially attempt multiple Millenium problems using a variety of multiagent techniques.
(a) We began working on the Millennium problems due to viral twitter rumors that Anthropic had resolved 2 Millenium problems. Our aim was to see whether our system was also capable of this impressive feat, especially given our excitement regarding the large recent capability increases of our internal model detailed in our blog post.
(b) We did not see any of their work until they released it publicly last night. One can in hindsight see that our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced). It is also worth noting that our team consisted largely of mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists with the deepest roots in academia and respect for the stature and integrity of the Millennium problems.
(c) Levent reached out unprompted to an OpenAI employee on Wednesday. Due to his numerous posts on Twitter (S^6, Jacobian, Hadamard…) which appear to represent Anthropic and use Anthropic internal models, we believed that their project was, at least in part, an Anthropic project. Additionally recent further tweets by Levent (“augustus mirabilis”) led us to believe that they had solved at least 1 Millennium problem and would likely release it soon.
(d) Regarding the level of human involvement on our end: although a group of people was involved in our efforts, we collectively had no research-level expertise in fluid dynamics and the Navier-Stokes problem, and therefore were unable to meaningfully contribute to the mathematical content. We involved several people in order to initially attempt multiple Millenium problems using a variety of multiagent techniques.
5:39 PM UTC · Sep 8, 2026 · 397.8K Views
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