GoKawiilMathematician Andreas Thom accuses OpenAI's Astra of using his unpublished proof
Andreas Thom published a Mastodon post alleging that OpenAI's Astra model may have been trained on private conversations between him and Gábor Kun as they worked toward proving Gromov's soficity conjecture, one of ten problems OpenAI credited to Astra. Thom, a longtime expert on sofic and hyperlinear groups, spent two decades on the problem and says the evidence points to his unpublished work being absorbed rather than independently derived.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
This adds to a growing pattern, alongside claims from Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster, suggesting that some AI-claimed mathematical breakthroughs may actually be repackaged human work obtained without consent. If confirmed, it would undermine trust in AI research claims and raise serious questions about how training data is sourced and disclosed.
- Andreas Thom alleges Astra was trained on his private, unpublished proof discussions.
- This is the third such allegation, following claims from Alpöge and Buckmaster.
- If substantiated, it could reveal a systemic issue of AI models absorbing uncredited human mathematical work.
Moleskine Classic Hardcover Notebook — When your unpublished proofs might end up in someone else's training data, there's something reassuring about working offline on paper. The Moleskine Classic hardcover holds up to years of scribbled lemmas, and the squared-page version is ideal for diagrams and group-theory notation.
See Moleskine Classic Hardcover Notebook on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: twitter.com, 2026-09-10
Published there as: “OpenAI might have stolen another major proof”
Read the original report → The summary and analysis above are GoKawiil's own, written from reporting by the source above. Facts and quotes belong to the original publisher.