Tristan Buckmaster describes pressure over authorship and publication during discussions about competing AI-assisted mathematics results. Sébastien Bubeck disputes that characterization and says the proposed authorship concerned OpenAI's own proof. His apology for career-related wording does not settle the disagreement. Researchers and commentators divide over whether the negotiations were appropriate, while raising a separate dispute about the treatment of unpublished user research.
Role at the time: Mathematician describing his own experience and ethical concerns in a personal public post
Challenged the characterization
Responding to
Did OpenAI improperly pressure mathematicians over authorship and credit?
"De-identification may remove a name; it does not remove the intellectual content of a mathematical idea."
Why we used this label
He questions the sufficiency and transparency of OpenAI's account while presenting the ethical objection conditionally. This is adjacent firsthand context, not proof of theft or misconduct in the Buckmaster authorship dispute.
Andreas Thom is a mathematician at Technische Universität Dresden. His research spans geometric group theory, real algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, ergodic theory, and operator algebras. He also participates in public discussions about mathematical research and scientific practice.
Associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, researching the theoretical foundations of reinforcement learning.
