25 Fields Medallists Declare Misalignment With AI Companies

Posted this morning on his blog, Terence Tao announced he is among 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to a declaration stating that "the goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned." The roster reads like a living history of the medal: Tao (2006), Scholze (2018), Viazovska (2022), Donaldson (1986), Deligne (1978), up through Yu Deng (2026). The Economist ran its framing within the hour: "Top mathematicians are outraged by OpenAI's methods."

What the declaration actually says

Two days of urgent drafting, released without the consultative process Tao's group used for the earlier Leiden declaration — because, in his words, "the urgency of the situation was such that we needed to release a statement sooner rather than later." The core claim: LLMs now solve major outstanding problems, but the companies treat those solutions as benchmarks, not as mathematics. Rush announcements skip proper writeups, method isolation, and citation of prior work — which the signatories flag directly as "severe attribution and plagiarism questions." Mass-produced "true/false" statements, they argue, destroy the fertile ground that turns a proof into an idea the community can actually use.

Why it matters: the pattern is now visible

Connect three points from this week alone. Sept 9: Tao warns AI is flattening open math problems. Sept 10: OpenAI's math training-data practices surface. Sept 11: a solo warning becomes an institutional bloc of every Fields Medallist who'd sign. The discipline's most decorated practitioners just did what no open-weights community has: coordinated, named the platform, and declared the incentive structure itself the problem. Note the language — they explicitly extend this to "other scientific and creative professions." Mathematics is the test case, not the boundary.

Verdict: benchmark pressure on open problems just met its organized counterparty. Watch whether labs respond with attribution frameworks or with press releases. The declaration invites further signatures — the count won't stay at 25.