Tristan Buckmaster from NYU and Levent Alpöge from Anthropic conducted independent research on Euler's equations, utilizing OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude as assistants. The pair verified their results on August 22, 2026, using the Lean programming language.
Following rumors that Anthropic had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, Buckmaster contacted OpenAI. During subsequent discussions, OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck claimed the company had also proven a finite-time blowup for the forced Navier-Stokes equations.
Buckmaster alleges that OpenAI's approach mirrored his own and questions whether his team's session data was used to train OpenAI models. OpenAI stated it cannot rule out that de-identified user data helped improve its models.
OpenAI reportedly offered Buckmaster two publication options, one of which required excluding Alpöge from the paper due to his employment at Anthropic. Buckmaster declined both proposals.
Buckmaster claims Bubeck threatened his career during their interactions. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman defended the company's actions, while Bubeck stated that including an Anthropic employee as an author on OpenAI's work would be inappropriate.
