OpenAI Pulls Support for Caltech Math Hackathon After Mathematicians Warn Of ‘Slop Mathematics’

OpenAI has withdrawn its sponsorship of a mathematics hackathon at the California Institute of Technology after current and former Caltech mathematicians warned that the event could have damaging consequences for the mathematical community and deepen tensions over how artificial intelligence is being used to conduct research.

The decision came a day after academics published an open letter criticizing the event, backed by AI companies, which challenges participants to use large language models to tackle open mathematical problems.

Dan Roberts, OpenAI's research lead, said Thursday that the company was no longer sponsoring the event, known as Mathathon, and acknowledged that the rapid advance of AI in mathematics had created tensions that required greater engagement with researchers.

"We recognize that the rapid progress of AI in mathematics is disruptive," Roberts said on X. "We're looking to engage with the math community more on the best way to integrate this technology and communicate its impacts."

The dispute points to a growing divide between AI companies eager to demonstrate that their models can contribute to frontier scientific research and mathematicians who say those claims can shift substantial amounts of verification and research work onto academics without adequate credit or compensation.

The academics described the practice as "slop mathematics," noting that AI companies can present apparently novel solutions to difficult theoretical problems while leaving human researchers to determine whether the results are actually correct.

"After the latest result is dropped, research mathematicians are compelled to step in to properly verify, disseminate, and sometimes discredit entirely the claimed results," the mathematicians wrote. "This labor goes uncompensated, uncredited, and unacknowledged."

The criticism intensified after OpenAI said Tuesday that its AI agents had solved the Navier-Stokes equations, a roughly 90-year-old mathematical problem involving equations used to describe the movement of fluids and gases.

The claim immediately became a subject of scrutiny among mathematicians, particularly because establishing that a proposed computational solution constitutes a genuine solution to a major unsolved mathematical problem requires rigorous proof and independent verification.

Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University who, together with another academic, had published research related to the problem on Monday, questioned whether OpenAI's systems could have benefited from his previous conversations with AI chatbots, including OpenAI's products.

OpenAI said it could not rule out the possibility that "de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models."

That episode has added to concerns about the boundaries between AI-assisted mathematical research, model training and the ownership or attribution of intellectual contributions. For mathematicians, the issue extends beyond whether an AI-generated answer is ultimately correct. It also involves who gets credit for discoveries, who performs the labor needed to validate them, and whether researchers whose work contributes indirectly to AI systems are properly acknowledged.

The Caltech mathematicians also said that Mathathon could effectively become an advertising vehicle for AI companies, allowing them to associate themselves with the work of promising young researchers.

They said the companies could "take credit for the effort of talented undergrads," raising questions about whether students participating in an AI-sponsored competition fully understand how their work might be used or presented.

Mathathon was designed as a test bed for the use of AI in mathematical research. Its application materials describe the event as an opportunity for young mathematicians to "responsibly use AI tools to augment human understanding of mathematics."

Participants are expected to compete in an initial round lasting 40 hours, during which they receive $20,000 worth of AI tokens to work on an open research problem.

Teams producing answers judged to be "promising and well explained" can then advance to a second stage lasting six months, with additional AI credits to continue developing their work.

OpenAI and Anthropic had agreed to support the competition with a combined $2 million in AI credits. It remained unclear Thursday how much of that contribution came from OpenAI and what would happen to the company's pledged credits following its withdrawal.

Anthropic, which is also sponsoring the event, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The organizers, many of whom are undergraduates, said Thursday that they had not intended for the competition to generate the controversy surrounding it.

"Events like Mathathon encourage young people to stay excited about mathematics, engage their interests with modern tools, and maintain hope in a confusing time," they wrote in a response letter. "It's our first time running an event at this scale, and we are grateful for all the feedback we have received."

The disagreement exposes a broader challenge for AI companies as their models move deeper into scientific and academic work. Demonstrating that an AI system can generate an apparently sophisticated mathematical result is one thing; establishing that the result represents a meaningful advance in human knowledge is another.

Mathematics is particularly unforgiving in this regard. A proposed answer can appear compelling while containing a subtle logical error, an unsupported assumption or a gap that invalidates the entire argument. Independent researchers therefore remain essential to checking claims, establishing proofs and determining whether a result is genuinely new.

The situation has created an unusual tension for AI-driven research. The companies developing increasingly capable models have strong incentives to publicize breakthroughs, while the academic community often bears much of the burden of determining whether those breakthroughs withstand scrutiny.

Therefore, OpenAI's decision to leave the Caltech event may be more than a sponsorship dispute. It signals that the rapid integration of AI into mathematics is beginning to force difficult questions about research ethics, attribution, and the division of labor between machines and the humans expected to validate their work.