AI companies are solving open math problems, unsettling mathematicians

At the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September, discussion centered on OpenAI, Anthropic and Google pushing into mathematics. IEEE Spectrum reports AI has produced solutions to previously unsolved problems this year, and that the companies are targeting the Millennium Problems.

Why it matters: Math is the ideal AI testbed because answers are objectively verifiable, so progress there is hard to dismiss as hype and can be scored at scale. It also pushes the field to decide what credit and authorship mean when machines produce the proofs, echoing the earlier case of a physicist producing 36 papers with Claude in three months.