OpenAI denies seeing Buckmaster or Alpöge prompts, says it spent millions on compute after hearing Anthropic achieved a breakthrough
anthropic openai
| Source: Techmeme | Original article
OpenAI says its researchers and models never saw Buckmaster or Alpöge's prompts and that it invested millions in compute after learning of Anthropic's breakthrough.
OpenAI has pushed back against accusations that it leveraged the unpublished work of mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge in a race to solve the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem. In a statement to Wired, the company said neither its researchers nor any of its AI systems ever saw the pair’s prompts before they were made public, and that no “search through user data” was used to generate a solution. OpenAI added that, after learning that Anthropic – a rival frontier‑AI lab – had announced a breakthrough on the same problem, it allocated “millions in compute” to its own effort.
The claim matters because it touches on two hot‑button issues in the AI field: the ethics of using competitors’ unpublished ideas and the scale of compute resources deployed in high‑stakes research. If OpenAI did indeed accelerate its work based on a tip‑off from Anthropic, it would raise questions about fair competition and the transparency of AI‑driven scientific discovery. The dispute also feeds into broader scrutiny of frontier labs’ practices, echoing a class‑action lawsuit we covered on September 8 that questioned whether Anthropic misled power users, and a separate report that OpenAI’s internal model allegedly solved Navier–Stokes using 10 000 concurrent agents.
What to watch next is whether regulators or academic bodies will probe the allegations, and if OpenAI or Anthropic will release further technical details to substantiate their claims. A follow‑up from the mathematician community could also surface, potentially prompting formal disputes over intellectual property or research conduct. The episode underscores the growing tension between rapid AI‑driven breakthroughs and the norms governing collaborative scientific work.
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