OpenAI o3 scores 25% on FrontierMath research-level maths benchmark, amid funding disclosure controversy
Disputed
The takeaway
Epoch AI’s FrontierMath (Nov 2024) contains unpublished research-level problems on which models scored under 2%.
Status
- Claim
Disputed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Verification
- Expert-checked
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- FrontierMath paper v1: 7 Nov 2024; prior models <2%
- o3 claimed 25.2% (aggressive test-time compute setting) on 20 Dec 2024
- OpenAI’s funding and data access disclosed only in paper v5 (20 Dec 2024); Epoch said it should have been more transparent
- Later records: Gemini 3 Pro 38% (Tiers 1-3) and 19% (Tier 4) in Nov 2025; GPT-5.2 Pro 31% on Tier 4 in Jan 2026
What happened
OpenAI previewed o3 with a headline FrontierMath score an order of magnitude above prior models. The benchmark’s independence was then questioned when OpenAI’s funding and access came to light.
Why it matters
It was the first sign that research-level maths was yielding to reasoning models, and an early lesson in benchmark governance and conflicts of interest.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 1 primary, 2 press
Primary
- Epoch AI: OpenAI and FrontierMathepoch.ai, official
Press
- The Decoder: OpenAI quietly funded independent math benchmarkthe-decoder.com, press
- TechRepublic: independent FrontierMath score for o3techrepublic.com, press
Changes
- Filed