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Ten thousand AI agents, 88 hours, and a fight over who got there first

10 September 2026
Ten thousand AI agents, 88 hours, and a fight over who got there first
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Ten thousand AI agents, 88 hours, and a fight over who got there first

Eighty-eight hours, and roughly 10,000 AI agents running in parallel. That is what OpenAI says it took to produce a proof that a smooth fluid at rest under the Navier-Stokes equations can develop a singularity in finite time. The proof was formalised in Lean and published.

Key Takeaways

  • OpenAI says roughly 10,000 coordinating agents ran for 88 hours to produce a Lean-formalised proof that Navier-Stokes can develop a finite-time singularity
  • OpenAI says it will not claim the 1 million dollar Clay Millennium Prize, and the Clay Institute still lists the problem as open
  • NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster questions whether the method was reached independently, after close to a year of related work with Anthropic researcher Levent Alpoge
  • Clay rules require journal publication, independent verification and a two year waiting period before any submission counts

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