OpenAI Declines Second $1M Math Prize, This Time From Justin Sun

For the second time in weeks, OpenAI has been awarded a $1 million mathematics prize — and for the second time, the company has not collected the money. The latest award comes from Justin Sun's newly established prize fund.

The prize was created to honor an AI-generated proof of the Navier-Stokes equations, a long-standing challenge in fluid dynamics. Two mathematicians have alleged that the work relied on their unpublished research, a claim OpenAI has rejected.

Why OpenAI Continues to Refuse the Money

On September 8, OpenAI released its proof of the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes problem. The company stated that 10,000 AI agents worked on the problem for 88 hours, and then another model — GPT-6 Astra — spent an additional 17 hours verifying the logic.

The Clay Mathematics Institute originally listed the problem in 2000 as one of seven Millennium Prize Problems, each offering a $1 million reward. The institute's website still lists it as unsolved.

OpenAI announced at the time that it would not claim the Clay prize. The story gained more attention after questions emerged about whether the proof was actually built on the work of others.

Two researchers claimed their unpublished work appeared inside an OpenAI product. The company denied this allegation.

“I do not know what their model did, or how. I do not know whether our data was used. I am not accusing anyone of anything,” said Tristan Buckmaster, a professor at New York University.

Another Prize, Another Refusal

Eight days after the dispute arose, Justin Sun's office announced its own response to the same mathematical problem. The Justin Sun Prize was created — a bounty system that prioritizes machine-checkable proofs over traditional peer review.

Each entry on Sun's list can pay out two separate awards: one for proving the result and another for translating that proof into formal code. Sun's team declared the OpenAI research group the winner of the prize's first $1 million top award for the Navier-Stokes proof.

The Navier-Stokes entry is the fifth item on the list. It is marked as solved, credited to the OpenAI team, listed as eligible to claim, but remains unclaimed.

Under Sun's rules, any problem already solved before it was added to the list pays the person who formalizes the proof for a machine, not the person who originally proved it.

“I care only about the result, not whether the contributor is human or a machine,” Justin Sun said.

A warning appears next to that entry on Sun's list. It states that the OpenAI announcement has not undergone peer review and that acceptance by mathematicians has not yet been confirmed.