You should care about the AI math breakthrough drama even if you're not a nerd

On September 8, 2026, Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University, and Levent Alpöge from Anthropic jointly published a paper in which they used AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic to make progress in the field of fluid motion prediction. The study indicated that there were instances where existing mathematics could not accurately describe smooth water flow and air movement, and it was alleged that OpenAI was aware of these findings and that internal models had made breakthroughs. OpenAI subsequently officially claimed to have solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, sparking controversy over scientific authorship, AI training data, and academic records. Buckmaster responded that OpenAI did not access specific user data, but he could not rule out the possibility that anonymized data helped improve the models. This event was described by *Scientific American* as “the biggest math day in at least twenty years.”