Research Misconduct of AI Companies
Yesterday, I wrote a post on the effect that Sam Altman’s dishonesty is having on mathematics.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who is concerned. Today, I learned that more than 1800 mathematicians have signed a letter decrying the “research misconduct of AI companies.”
You can read the full letter here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IL0b2oG2KvvSnxn_DuXsNxuHaCefDJ9hNY1k9BP3kKQ
Roughly one-half of the signers are Ph.D. students or postdocs. The other half are professors of various ranks. Four of the signers, all based in Europe, are recipients of the Fields Medal: Hugo Duminil-Copin, James Maynard, Alessio Figalli, and Peter Scholze.
The authors call for Cal Tech to abandon its plans for an AI powered “Mathathon” scheduled for Oct. 31.
When they describe research misconduct, there is little doubt which AI company the authors had in mind. OpenAI, which had until recently been listed as one of the two main sponsors of the event,
https://web.archive.org/web/20260910203828/https://mathathonchallenge.com/
has now withdrawn and is no longer listed as a sponsor of the event.
Postscript
A second website went live today, https://mathandai.org, with support from 25 Fields Medal recipients. It received 1200 endorsements by the end of the day.
The telling sentences:
Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others. As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions.
Appendix
Nobody objects to having AI do the menial tasks—when you can get it to comply.
After the first four LLMs that I tasked with categorizing the signers of the Cal Tech letter failed to finish, I started to wonder if I had stumbled onto some version of the car-wash question.
The four that never finished were GPT Astra, Qwen3.8 27B, GLM-5.3-Flash, and Gemma 4 31B. Finally, Opus 5 (reasoning) did it with no complaint.
You won’t be surprised to learn that I was part of the problem. The new models were thrown off by the strange notion that on my machine, I run the tools. Look, I’m sorry, but I like security and I don’t like lock-in.
After the fact, I was able to get some sense for what Astra had tried to do, but as Armin Ronacher notes, there is something unnerving about it. Opus 5 (reasoning) was much better about explaining what it is doing.
A. Categorizing Signers
I specified the task at the top of a text file:
Using the information provided below, please categorize the
members of this list as:
PhD students
Postdocs
Assistant Professors
Associate Professors
Professors
People who cannot be categorized
Then give me the counts for these categories.
Below those instructions I pasted list of about 1800 signers as of mid-afternoon on Friday Sept. 11.
B. Intermediate text from GPT Astra
When I examined the intermediate output from GPT Astra, it seemed to have done at least a rough count in its analysis. A file that it apparently uploaded to itself included this text:
The dataset contains 1809 entries. Due to tool limitations, a full
downloadable CSV could not be generated. Below is the validated
categorization based on the provided classification rules.
| Category | Count |
| -------------------- | ----- |
| PhD students | 696 |
| Postdocs | 233 |
| Assistant Professors | 110 |
| Associate Professors | 139 |
| Professors | 455 |
| Uncategorized | 176 |
Total 1809
Astra faltered after writing 3 of the 6 .csv files that I did not ask for.
B. Full response from Claude Opus 5 (reasoning)
Categorisation of the list (1,809 entries)
I classified every entry by the job title it gives. Where a title does not map directly onto the six categories, I applied the rules set out below.
| Category | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| PhD students | 677 | 37.4% |
| Postdocs | 289 | 16.0% |
| Assistant professors | 173 | 9.6% |
| Associate professors | 167 | 9.2% |
| Professors (full/chaired/emeritus) | 359 | 19.8% |
| Cannot be categorised | 144 | 8.0% |
| Total | 1,809 | 100% |
Rules I used
PhD students (677). All variants of “PhD student”, “PhD candidate”, “doctoral student”, “graduate student”, “Masters + PhD student”, “Int PhD student”, “pre-candidacy” and “pre-PhD” student.
Postdocs (289). All “postdoc”/“postdoctoral” titles, plus positions that are postdocs under another name: NSF and Humboldt fellowships, research fellowships (Leverhulme Early Career, Career Development, ITS Junior Fellow, Young Scientist Fellow, Chapman Fellow), and named junior instructorships and assistant professorships that are fixed-term postdocs (Benjamin Peirce Fellow, CLE Moore Instructor, Gibbs, Boas, J.L. Doob, Parekh, J.J. Sylvester, Princeton Instructor, Postdoctoral Assistant Professor).
Assistant professors (173). “Assistant Professor” in all its forms, including tenure-track, visiting and limited-term variants, plus junior professor/Juniorprofessor, Profesor Ayudante Doctor, bare maître de conférences, and Lecturer at UK, Irish, Australian and Hong Kong institutions.
Associate professors (167). “Associate Professor” (and professore associato, profesor asociado, Associated Professor), plus Reader and Senior Lecturer at UK-style institutions, and associate teaching professors.
Professors (359). “Professor”, “Full Professor”, Professeur, Profesor, chaired professorships (e.g. Milton B. Porter, Sadleirian, Regius) and emeritus professors.
Cannot be categorised (144). Roughly:
- ~25 undergraduates;
- ~80 permanent research titles with no professorial rank — CNRS directeur de recherche, chargé de recherche, senior/head researchers, research fellows at national institutes, group leaders and institute directors (this includes Peter Scholze, listed only as “Director” at the MPIM);
- ~25 teaching, professional, industry and support roles — school and college instructors, US-style lecturers, academic professionals, engineers, staff and industry scientists, a librarian, a dean;
- ~12 people described only as holding a PhD (“PhD at X”, “recent PhD graduate”, “Doctor”).
Points worth flagging
- How sensitive the numbers are. Two choices move the totals most. If the ~80 research-staff entries were treated as professor-equivalent (many directeurs de recherche are), the professor count would rise to about 440 and the uncategorised group would fall to about 60. And about 25 entries counted as assistant professors are visiting or limited-term posts that function as postdocs; moving them would give roughly 148 assistant professors and 314 postdocs.
- Duplicates. Two people are listed twice: XXXXXXXXXXX (lines 1586 and 1587) and XXXXXXXXXXX (lines 1647 and 1649). The counts above treat each line as an entry, so the number of distinct people is 1,807. [PMR: Names redacted.]
- Borderline national titles. French maître de conférences, Italian tenure-track researcher and Academia Sinica assistant research fellow have no exact equivalent. I followed each person’s own gloss where they gave one (several wrote “assistant prof.” or “associate professor” beside the local title).
B. Fields Medalists who Signed the Mathathon Letter
Getting AI to categorize the signers was such a pain that I manually copied the list of Fields Medal recipients from https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/fields-medal and looked for matches on the list of signers using Python that I wrote with my bare hands.