OpenAI says 10,000 AI agents solved a $1 million math problem. Now mathematicians are fighting

OpenAI says an unreleased, experimental AI system solved one of mathematics’ most famous unsolved problems after roughly 10,000 agents worked together for just 88 hours.

The company published a proposed solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems carrying a $1 million prize. The equations describe how fluids such as water and air move, while the unsolved question asks whether a perfectly smooth flow can eventually break down and produce speeds that grow without limit.

OpenAI’s system says it can. Its proof described a fluid vortex that becomes increasingly stretched and concentrated until its speed blows up in finite time, even while the system’s total energy stays finite.

Real fluids cannot move infinitely fast as per the current understanding of physics. At sufficiently extreme scales, the assumption behind Navier-Stokes that a fluid can be treated as one continuous substance would stop matching physical reality.

The result came from an internal model that OpenAI says is significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra (its most advanced publicly available model). Around 10,000 agents exchanged 2.7 million messages and generated roughly 130 billion tokens while working on Navier-Stokes, before Astra spent another 17 hours formalizing and checking the proof.

The practical impact of the proof itself will take time, however. Navier-Stokes equations are used in areas such as aircraft design, weather forecasting and blood-flow research, so a better understanding of where the equations can break down could eventually improve how scientists model extreme and turbulent flows.

The bigger implication may be the system that found it. If thousands of AI agents can attack a 90-year-old mathematical problem in a matter of days, the same approach could eventually be turned toward hard problems in materials science, energy, aerospace, medicine and other fields.

OpenAI challenged

There is already controversy over how independently the result was reached.

NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge were separately working on a closely related fluid-dynamics problem and had used AI tools during their research. Buckmaster has questioned whether unpublished work entered into OpenAI products could have influenced the company’s model, in a series of posts on social network Mastodon.