SERIES · AI is making papers cheap to produce but they remain costly to referee. Proofs and Prompts is publishing a series of posts from 26 October on the future of publishing, papers and credit. Questions such as how to disclose AI use, who bears the cost of checking, what authorship means and what papers of the future might look like will be addressed. This post is part of the series. Each is written independently and reflects only its authors’ views. All posts in the series
The mathematical literature contains mistakes. Articles on the arXiv are not refereed, and even peer review does not guarantee that articles are error-free. In private communication, many (tenured and non-tenured) colleagues have told me that they now run their drafts through an AI model before posting, and that this sometimes catches serious mistakes. The capabilities of AI to catch mistakes seem to have improved drastically in the last months.
In a recent study for MathArena, we asked GPT-6.1 Sol to extract the main theorems of arXiv papers and search for explicit counterexamples to these theorems. Each counterexample was then verified and classified by severity. Across 656 papers from January 2025 to July 2026, the model reported major errors in about 6% of papers. For 137 papers from August and September 2026, a period in which over a quarter of arXiv papers began acknowledging AI use, that rate fell to 1.5%.
A likely explanation is that some authors already ran an AI check and fixed what it found. Part of the effect may also be because more recent work is partly AI-generated, and a model may have a harder time finding errors in an AI-generated argument. Still, the trend matches what people are telling me and my personal experience.
Our suggestion is to do an AI check before posting a manuscript, and there is evidence that many mathematicians are already doing so. Also, it is very likely good practice to run your older papers through an AI check to see if any results need fixing.
Full write-up and data: J. Dekoninck, T. Gehrunger, K. Rögnvaldsson, C. Sun, M. Vechev, Searching for errors in mathematical papers with GPT-6.1 Sol, MathArena, October 2026. https://matharena.ai/literature_mistakes/
Received 30 October 2026.
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