OpenAI 'dan Bubeck, Anthropic matematikçiyi krediden düşürmeye çalıştığını reddetti

Sébastien Bubeck of OpenAI at The Great Chatbot Debate, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, March 2025

Sébastien Bubeck is the OpenAI researcher at the centre of the Navier-Stokes credit dispute. He has now given his account of the private talks with the two mathematicians who say OpenAI mistreated them. He denies trying to strip one of them of credit for his own work. He also apologises for one remark.

Bubeck set out his version in a post on X on 8 September. He is answering a public statement by Tristan Buckmaster, a professor at New York University. Buckmaster worked on the problem with Levent Alpöge of Anthropic. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman backed Bubeck in his own post less than half an hour later. TNW has not independently verified either side’s account of private calls and messages.

Bubeck says he first contacted Alpöge to coordinate their releases. “I hope it’s clear from the message that we came in with the best possible intentions,” he wrote. Then came a call with Buckmaster. Bubeck says he was surprised to learn there that the pair had solved the Euler problem, not Navier-Stokes.

After that, he says, the two sides brainstormed options. One was for Buckmaster to be lead author on a rewrite of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof. That, Bubeck says, is when he said “it would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee”.

He felt it would be inappropriate for an Anthropic employee to author OpenAI’s work.

Bubeck says he “never ever” asked to remove Alpöge from authorship of his own work. He adds that the pair had admitted using internal Anthropic models on their Euler proof. For that reason, he writes, he could not treat Alpöge as an independent academic. He also wanted to offer the pair access to OpenAI’s internal model. The idea was to let them try to close the gap from Euler to Navier-Stokes. He did not know how to handle giving OpenAI’s internal technology to an Anthropic employee, he wrote.

Bubeck says the call turned hostile. He writes that he was met with “a litany of slander”. That included a threat to go to the press with what he calls unfounded accusations if OpenAI announced its result. At that point, he says, he asked why anyone would risk their career over such accusations.

“I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words,” he wrote. He says he retracted the remark on the spot.