Dan Roberts, a research lead at OpenAI, posted on X on Thursday that OpenAI is ending its sponsorship of the Caltech Mathathon. His phrasing: the company recognises that the rapid progress of AI in mathematics is disruptive.
The mathematicians at the centre of this had used a different word. Destructive.
What the competition actually is
The Mathathon is not a benchmark race. 100 teams of mathematicians each get 40 hours and $20,000 in tokens to work on a single question: how can we responsibly use AI tools to augment human understanding of mathematics? The first round starts October 30. OpenAI and Anthropic had together pledged $2 million in credits.
That setup is exactly what the fight is about.
The open letter
This week, current and former Caltech mathematicians published an open letter. The charge is blunt: AI firms have advanced a campaign of scientific misinformation about the goals of mathematical research in order to advertise their products. The resulting “slop mathematics”, the letter argues, amounts to research misconduct, because it consumes the work of research mathematicians and scoops them without contributing anything to understanding. The Mathathon itself, it warned, would have destructive impacts for the mathematical community.
The letter landed in an argument that was already running. OpenAI had announced in the same week that it solved the Navier-Stokes problem. Mathematicians dispute the proof, and that turned into a real fight: Tristan Buckmaster of NYU and Anthropic’s Levent Alpöge publicly raised the question of whether OpenAI had learned they were close to a breakthrough and appropriated their work through training data. Two days later, 25 Fields Medallists signed a declaration of their own.
What the withdrawal means in practice
A Mathathon spokesperson told Gizmodo that OpenAI specifically covered $10,000 of the $20,000 per team. The organisers say they are in talks with other firms willing to contribute a similar amount per team, and that they do not anticipate this affecting the event in any substantial way.
So half the budget is gone, and the organisers are unbothered.
My take
The striking part is what OpenAI is defunding here. The Mathathon is not the contest where models crack conjectures. It is the one where mathematicians work out how to use these tools well — roughly what the critics have been asking for.
The open letter was harsh, no question. A sponsor taking the criticism seriously still had the other option available: stay in and listen. Instead the mathematicians now have their question answered without ever having asked it.
Sources: Gizmodo: OpenAI Is Beefing With Mathematicians, Will No Longer Sponsor Caltech ‘Mathathon’, Business Insider via Yahoo: OpenAI pulls out of Caltech math hackathon, Techmeme roundup