In September 2026 an AI company said it had resolved one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, and within three days twenty-five Fields Medallists had signed a declaration saying the way such results are being produced and announced is damaging mathematics. This collection is a timeline of that week, assembled from the documents the participants published under their own names.
What OpenAI states it did: trained a new internal model from 28 August; heard rumours on 1 September that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved; launched coordinating groups of agents against all the open problems; resolved the Euler regularity question with nearly 100 agents over about 50 hours; then reached a Navier–Stokes result on 5 September with a group on the order of 10,000 concurrent agents, about 88 hours after launch, followed by 17 hours of Lean formalisation. Across everything attempted, 4.9 million messages and about 300 billion output tokens. The company states it does not intend to claim the prize.
What Tristan Buckmaster states, in a signed statement published about twelve hours earlier: that he and Levent Alpöge had spent most of a year on a program that was not theirs and was not proposed by a model — the credit for the idea belongs to Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa — obtaining blowup under smooth forcing on 15 August and verifying it in Lean on 22 August. He describes calls on 6 September in which, he says, he was first told the model had simply been given the problem statement, and it then emerged that a team had been working on it and that even the prompt he was shown had been written by prompting Codex. He states he was told 'Why would you ruin your career?' when he said he would go public. He is also explicit about what he is not claiming: he has not seen the proof, does not know what the model did, and is not accusing anyone of anything.
The two accounts are both on this page and neither is resolved here. This index has read two documents; it has not read the proofs, the prompts, the chat logs or the calls, and it has no way to determine which account of a private conversation is accurate. Recording the conflict precisely, with each side's words attributed to the document that contains them, is the most this format can honestly do — and it is more than a summary that picks a side would do.
On whether the problem is 'solved': the Clay Mathematics Institute's own rules, adopted in 2018, require publication in a qualifying outlet, at least two years elapsed since publication, and general acceptance in the global mathematics community, before the Institute will even consider a proposed solution. By that standard nothing announced in September 2026 can be settled before September 2028, whatever the mathematics turns out to say. That is a procedural fact, not an opinion about the proof.
One more thing belongs here, five weeks earlier and involving different people: a group theorist, Andreas Thom, describing finding his own joint work inside a crucial proposition of an OpenAI paper and the public announcement describing a decade of 'no progress'. Two episodes do not make a pattern, but they make the declaration's complaint about citation legible as something other than an abstraction.