Twenty-seven Fields Medallists — among them Terence Tao, Peter Scholze, Maryna Viazovska and 2026 laureate Yu Deng — have signed a declaration warning that the race to make AI solve famous mathematics problems is "severely misaligned" with what mathematics is actually for.
Published at mathandai.org under the title "A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics", the declaration argues that solving problems is only a tool and proxy for the real goal of conceptual understanding. The signatories warn that mass-producing "true/false" statements at ever greater speed "could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas", leaving no time for proper write-ups, isolation of new methods or citation of prior work — and raising serious attribution and plagiarism questions.
The letter lands amid a fierce debate over AI's mathematical progress. OpenAI has said a new internal model solved more than 100 long-standing problems across most areas of mathematics after roughly a month of training that began on 28 August, and it claims a second Millennium Prize Problem alongside the earlier Navier–Stokes result, whose published solution has itself been contested.
OpenAI simultaneously announced an advisory group on mathematics and AI based at the Institute for Advanced Study. The company says members can advise freely, publish recommendations, speak publicly and are unpaid — but it has excluded one thing from their remit: how fast OpenAI should push its own mathematics research.
The split is visible even inside the laureates' ranks. Timothy Gowers, a Fields Medallist who joined the advisory group but did not sign the declaration, agrees mathematics is in trouble, yet argues the real risk is that the social structures sustaining mathematical knowledge collapse — if the prospect of solving famous problems no longer draws students in, it is unclear what will.
