Note: The Mathathon organizers have published a response, available here.
On October 30th, 2026, Caltech will begin hosting the Caltech Mathathon, a math hackathon in which participants are encouraged to solve open research problems by prompting LLMs. Two prominent AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, will supply participants with 2 million dollars in AI credits. This event is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community.
AI companies see research mathematics as an advertising opportunity. Over the past few months, they have advanced a campaign of scientific misinformation about the goals of mathematical research. Major AI companies are engaged in an arms race to declare themselves the first to prove prominent open conjectures. New announcements of AI-generated results appear on social media on a weekly basis. These results are often poorly communicated, and have diffuse negative impacts on the careers of human mathematicians who are concurrently proving the same results.
Mathematicians do not only prove theorems: they also take measures to ensure that the future of a field remains healthy after the extraction of a result. They do so by sharing their results and explaining their methods to others at talks and conferences. They mentor students and postdocs so that the next generation can advance research further, and take care not to scoop other mathematicians at the last mile. In announcing new LLM-generated theorems, AI companies have not followed such research practices. The intent is clearly to extract the prestige of newly proven results rather than add value to the community in a way that safeguards its future.
These companies appear guided by an unhealthy instinct to claim certain results before competitors at all costs, regardless of the collateral damage to mathematical understanding. After the latest result is dropped, research mathematicians are compelled to step in to properly verify, disseminate, and sometimes discredit entirely the claimed results. This labor goes uncompensated, uncredited, and unacknowledged. This benchmark-focused arms race shortcuts the standard peer review process, which necessitates time and effort, while extracting unpaid labor from research mathematicians. To put it bluntly, AI companies are engaging in research misconduct.
The Mathathon is poised to exacerbate the phenomenon above and further harmful market-driven narratives about research mathematics. Participants will quickly create AI-generated mathematics in an accelerated environment, while the real work of verification will then be displaced onto the mathematical community in the weeks and months after. AI companies will take credit for the effort of talented undergrads; the only relevant question to them is whether Claude or ChatGPT proved the most flashy result. Human mathematicians who are simultaneously proving the same results may be forced to abruptly abort these research projects, regardless of the additional insights their unique approaches may bring. The baseline conditions of this event highlight worrying financial inequities in the model of research mathematics promulgated by AI companies. There is no reasonable future model of mathematical research in which every research mathematician receives 20000 USD in AI credits to prove a result.
We, the undersigned, outline below some of our concerns about the broader impacts of the Mathathon.
- The creation of slop mathematics and the exacerbation of a market-driven arms race. Undergrad participants may lack the expertise to carefully verify the results they produce. Participants are not required by the rules of the competition to communicate their results on ArXiv after the event is over. It will again fall to the mathematical community to carefully verify hastily-produced AI-generated results.
- Intrusion of corporate interest. Events like these provide further financial and social leverage for AI corporations over mathematics. The goals of these corporations are not necessarily aligned with the aims of scientific research. As an independent scientific community, it is incumbent upon us to engage critically with AI companies and their tools. It is doubtful that such critical engagement will be incubated at the Mathathon.
- Conditions unlikely to foster mathematical understanding. As most mathematical researchers would agree, forty hours is not enough time to deeply understand, solve, and communicate a problem. The industrialized production of AI-generated mathematical content on extremely shortened timescales does not add value to our community. Such activities in fact carry broadly negative impacts.
- Damaging misinformation about research mathematics. This event is likely to feed into detrimental narratives about our research community. As a case in point, the website of the Mathathon explicitly asks “What is the role of a mathematician when AI can solve conjectures faster?”1 The claim that AI can solve conjectures faster than human mathematicians appears both motivated and empirically dubious.
- Failure to care for young mathematicians. The mathematical community is far from a consensus on how to evaluate AI-generated results or how to approach AI companies as a field. Participation in an event so closely associated with Anthropic and OpenAI could plausibly negatively impact the future reputations of participants. Rather than offering an opportunity for fruitful scientific collaboration, this event exploits mathematicians at the very beginning of their careers.
In view of the concerns above, we call on the organizers to suspend this event. Community members at Caltech and within research mathematics have already raised concerns about this event directly to the organizers. Some of us have offered alternative options to restructure the Mathathon, to unsatisfactory effect. In light of the inadequate and unacceptable responses to those recommendations, we ask that the organizers give up this harmful enterprise entirely.
- Footnote (September 10th, 2026): The website of the Mathathon has changed following the circulation of this open letter. Here is a link to a version of the website accessed September 8th, 2026, which included the line “What is the role of a mathematician when AI can solve conjectures faster?” ↩︎
At the time of publication, there are 771 signatories. A full list of signatories is available here.
If you wish to add your name to this open letter, see this form. Signatories must either be members of the Caltech community (including undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, researchers, and affiliates of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) or members of the mathematical research community (at the PhD level or higher).
Received 8 September 2026.
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