> It's not obvious to me that's an unethical thing to do

In terms of work in mathematics, something I personally would not do based on ethical grounds would be to hear a rumor that some researchers are taking a certain approach and may be nearing a solution, use a model that was possibly contaminated with intimate knowledge about that approach (though later they investigated and think it wasn't), and then commit millions to tens of millions of dollars and untold amounts of hardware to try to beat them to it. If I had done this, I also wouldn't have pestered the researchers on a Sunday night to meet immediately so we could negotiate a nice way of presenting the actions I had decided to take.

Even if you don't think it was unethical, it was never going to be received well in the community that was especially going to care about this work, and who are very much peers to many of the people working on this solution, so it was at the least an enormous (and well-deserved) own-goal that their unveiling of their solution to NS went like this.

As with all press releases I assume it was written/re viewed/redacted by their lawyers, so:

> no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem

Data was accessed in order to <other purpose> (and then accidentally used in training) Also, is llm’s answer to the prompt actually “user data”?

> We did not use their prompts or proofs …

So they used llm’s answers to those prompts.

> … to prompt our models or directew our agents.

So they trained the model on it. (Training is not prompting and plain model is not an agent)

We were also curious and we looked further into this. We've determined it was impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training. This goes beyond what we said earlier, when we were less sure.

If prompts were submitted earlier than that and training was not opted out, there may be a chance they made their way into our training pipeline in some form. But this would be a droplet in an ocean and unlikely to have made any difference, in my opinion.

(I work at OpenAI.)

Source for the updated claim: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...

> we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”

implied the humans sessions could have been (and probably were, why wouldn’t they be?) in the training set?

If I was trying to make a model smarter and I had transcripts from the smartest mathematicians in the world I’d make sure the model trained on them.

No.

1. Buckmaster contacted OpenAI first. Not the other way.

2. Giving the $1M bounty to a human mathematician for the effort and giving him credit would be excellent PR. They had already burned much more than $1M for the generation. Adding him as author also costs nothing. Purely pragmatical.

3. “As long as he removed Alpöge” part itself is against academic honesty by all means.

4. Buckmaster rejected fame and $1M only because doing (3) would be wrong. That’s a perfect example of honesty. That can’t be overstated.

5. After the rejection OpenAI guy (Sebastien) did’t say, “ok bye”. He threatened Buckmaster to “end his career”.

6. At that point OpenAI was not sure if they really used his conversations in their proof. He basically wanted to buy him to control any damage.

7. They omitted Buckmaster’s published work and any other related work in their References section. Also an academic malpractice.

If you see generosity and niceness in all of this you are either too naive or your name is Sebastien.

> if OpenAI just published the final result without notifying Buckmaster first and simply cited his previous researched, there would be no ground for anyone to accuse OpenAI for anything

Yes, there would? They would have left off Buckmaster as a precedent whose work they potentially relied on.

The reality would be the same. They probably used prior session history between the research and Astra to train the internal model, and used it to front run-the researcher.

This is the biggest self-own in the history of software. If you can relate to Pixar, OpenAI is Chick Hicks celebrating at the end of the Piston Cup and wondering why he's getting booed.

The lack of self-awareness is something to behold, and says a lot about their corporate values.

When you say "confidential in-house version", what are you referring to? Local models? Bedrock deployment with "guardrails"? A different thing?

Tools don’t turn around and scoop you. What OpenAI did here was use the same tool that the researcher did which might have coupled their work together.

i think this line of argument is outdated