AI systems score a perfect 42/42 at IMO 2026, officially graded
Result confirmed
Importance: historic (5 of 5)Status
- Claim
Result confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Verification
- Expert-checked
- Importance
- Historic (5 of 5)
- Last verified
- 7 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra84 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.523 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen114 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.753 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 23 days before it.
Key facts
- Perfect 42/42 (all six problems) for Huawei ‘Celia’ and RedNote ‘dots-note-3.0’ under the IMO’s formal AI evaluation process
- Process: AI received problems only after human contestants finished; strict time limit; no human intervention; graded by IMO organisers
- Humans: 7 of 666 contestants achieved full marks (IMO held in Shanghai)
- Per commentator Deedy Das (quoted by TechXplore), OpenAI, Anthropic, Axiom Math and Moonshot’s Kimi K3 also reached 42/42 (not all officially graded)
- Context: 2024 best AI = silver (4/6 problems over 2-3 days); 2025 = gold-level 35/42 (Google DeepMind, OpenAI)
- No AI was an official medal-eligible contestant
What happened
At IMO 2026 (Shanghai), several AI systems solved all six problems. The two officially graded perfect scores came from Chinese companies not usually considered frontier labs: Huawei (Celia) and Xiaohongshu/RedNote (dots-note-3.0, its first IMO entry). Multiple US labs and Moonshot also reported perfect solutions. Commentator Deedy Das: “The frontier of AI has officially moved well past IMO math.”
Why it matters
Olympiad math is now saturated as an AI benchmark just one year after the first gold-level results; attention shifts to research-level math (FrontierMath Tier 4, Erdős problems).
Sources
7 sources from 6 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
7 sources: 5 press, 2 reactions
Press
- TechXplore: AI catches up with humans to score 100% at top math contesttechxplore.com, press
- SCMP: RedNote’s AI model first to achieve flawless score at maths Olympiadscmp.com, press
- Taipei Times: AI models score 100 percent at top math competitiontaipeitimes.com, press
- Malay Mail: Huawei, Xiaohongshu AI storm Olympiadmalaymail.com, press
- France 24 / AFP: AI catches up with humans to score 100% at top maths contestfrance24.com, press
Reactions
- Deedy Das on X: self-run IMO 2026 results for frontier modelsx.com, discussion
- NVIDIA AI on X: Nemotron 3 Ultra graded 30/42 by IMO teamx.com, discussion
Changes
- Science block: kind: other (not a long-open problem; listed with other AI science results, not in the open-problems count)
- Added science block (science & math tab)
- Added primary/secondary links during a verification pass
- Added post link(s) (1) from Google/DeepMind + math posts pass
- Filed