# OpenAI's Math Breakthrough Ignites Data Drama

> OpenAI claims to have solved the 90-year-old Navier-Stokes problem, but rival researchers suspect their private AI sessions fueled the proof.
- Title: OpenAI's Math Breakthrough Ignites Data Drama · The Verge
- Summary: OpenAI claims to have solved the 90-year-old Navier-Stokes problem, but rival researchers suspect their private AI sessions fueled the proof. AI…
- Keywords: openai, mathematics, tech news, privacy, technology, culture, OpenAI's, Math, Breakthrough, Ignites, Data, Drama
- Source: The Verge — https://theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/991710/openai-navier-stokes-solution
- Author: Emma Roth
- Published: 2026-09-08T20:53:52+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: ai, openai, mathematics, tech news, privacy, technology, culture
## OpenAI claims math breakthrough
OpenAI announced it discovered a solution to the 90-year-old Navier-Stokes problem using a powerful internal AI model running alongside 10,000 concurrent agents.

> discovered a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem — which relates to the flow of liquid and gas
## Rivals release related work first
Just one day prior, NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge published findings on a closely related mathematical problem.

> published findings on a related problem in partnership with Levent Alpöge, a researcher at Anthropic
## Suspicions over private code sessions
Buckmaster raised alarms after discovering OpenAI used a similar approach to his team's work, which had been drafted inside OpenAI's Codex tool.

> I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts
## OpenAI defends its training data
OpenAI denied accessing specific user data for the solution, though it admitted it could not rule out that de-identified user data influenced model training.

> while unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models
## OpenAI rejects $1M prize
OpenAI researcher Sebastien Bubeck insisted their proof differs significantly from Buckmaster's. OpenAI also confirmed it will not accept the $1 million Millennium Prize reward.

> One can in hindsight see that our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different.
## Key takeaway

AI breakthroughs in complex fields like mathematics are increasingly entangled with questions over training data provenance and user privacy.