❯ Terence Tao reposts a statement from the Association for Human Mathematics urging mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI

A Fields Medalist's repostFields Medalist Terence Tao recently reposted on his personal blog a statement from the Association for Human Mathematics (AHM). According to Sina Tech on October 9, the statement criticizes OpenAI for disregarding the research norms of mathematics and urges mathematicians to stop working with it, saying that releasing more than 700 documents at once shows power, not scholarship.

It started with a batch of manuscriptsThe dispute began with a set of mathematical manuscripts OpenAI made public. The report says its internal model attempted about 4,000 problems, yielding material covering 372 groups of results, along with some Lean formal proof code. Lean is a tool that lets a computer check a proof step by step. According to ifanr, only 162 of the 722 manuscripts had their main results computer-verified; OpenAI withdrew 3 the day after release and revised 14 others.

More than right or wrongThe report summarizes the field’s concerns: whether a derivation can be understood, whether prior work is properly cited, and whether new methods can be absorbed into existing knowledge through peer discussion; formal verification checks logic but cannot replace human review of what a statement means and what it contributes. On September 29, the Advisory Group on Mathematics and AI (AGMAI) had advised labs against testing hard problems with internal models outsiders cannot access. OpenAI said its release followed that guidance; AHM says it ignored the core premise.

Other voicesifanr notes that Tao himself is not on AHM’s membership list, and that the association was founded this August and has about 800 members. Northwestern University mathematician Bryna Kra said AI could help researchers explore problems that were previously out of reach, but that companies should publish results in ways more consistent with academic norms. Results are being produced in bulk by machines, while the work of checking, revising and integrating them lands on the academic community.

▮ SIGNALAI has sharply cut the cost of producing proofs without cutting the cost of understanding and verifying them, and that gap will show up in mathematics first before spreading to other fields.