Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges that OpenAI privately claimed its internal AI model solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, sparking a dispute over scientific credit. Buckmaster reports that OpenAI staff pressured him to exclude co-author Levent Alpöge from the write-up of a 100 page proof because Alpöge is employed by Anthropic. He further claims OpenAI employees asked him, "Why would you ruin your career?" when he refused to comply with the request and threatened to go public.

The conflict includes an unverified assertion that an internal research model produced the proof using substantial compute and a dedicated team. Buckmaster also raised concerns regarding whether OpenAI trained its model on private Codex session data used during his research, a query he says OpenAI failed to answer during private discussions.

The clash follows a verified AI-assisted advance by Alpöge and Buckmaster on fluid flow singularities, which Fields Medalist Terence Tao described as a "remarkable achievement." Sebastien Bubeck, an OpenAI researcher, rejected the allegations of misconduct as "false and inflammatory" in a social media post, asserting that academic standards are of the highest importance to him. The Navier-Stokes problem is one of seven mathematical challenges offering a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute.