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.

First of all I put "generosity" in quotes because I don't believe a corporation as big as OpenAI is even capable of acting out of generosity. It's always one of the three: A) PR B) commoditizing complements C) stupidity.

In this case it's more like C) though, as in hindsight the best move OpenAI could do is insisting that they just used an insurmountable number of tokens to exhaust all the published directions. They absolutely shouldn't have thought of negotiating with Buckmaster over the Clay prize at all, let alone trying to manipulate him into a situation where Alpöge is specifically excluded.

There are some mixed up things in your post, maybe double check next time, especially before quoting anyone, as you really undermine your point even if you're directionally right.

> Buckmaster rejected fame and $1M only because doing (3) would be wrong

I doubt Buckmaster would have accepted the offer to "write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAI model had resolved it" even if removing Alpöge from authorship wasn't a requirement. He clearly wanted nothing to do with OpenAI's actions here.

edit: I don't know if people think I'm disagreeing here, I'm certainly not, I'm just pointing out that playing the game of telephone with easily verifiable quotes is lazy and bad. For example, "end [your] career" was "ruin your career", and it was phrased as the much more "it would be a shame if something happened to you" like "Why would you ruin your career?" when Buckmaster said he would go public with this conversation: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf