Substantive AI use in arXiv math papers rises from 1.4% to 14% in five months
From the survey ‘The Gold Rush in AI4Math’.
Confirmed
The takeaway
A survey of 32,944 arXiv mathematics submissions (1 Mar – 20 Aug 2026) found 1,712 papers where AI made a substantive mathematical contribution.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 30 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra117 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.556 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen147 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.786 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 56 days before it.
Key facts
- Corpus: 32,944 arXiv math submissions, 1 Mar – 20 Aug 2026; 3,575 disclose AI use, 1,712 substantive
- Substantive AI use: 1.39% (March) → 14.09% (by 20 Aug 2026)
- 717 open-problem records: 510 fully resolved per authors (329 proved, 181 disproved), 103 still open
- US (33.7%) and China (32.9%) make up about two-thirds of weighted author contributions
- Table 3 examples (as the source papers report them, not individually verified here): Rota’s conjecture for flats (1970) disproved with ChatGPT 5.6 Pro; Stanley’s rankwise lower-bound conjecture (1988) disproved by the ‘TARS agent system’; Bernhart–Kainen dispersability conjecture (1979) disproved with GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4.6
What happened
Statisticians Jiashun Jin, Zheng Tracy Ke and Bingcheng Sui classified AI disclosures in six months of arXiv math preprints. They catalogued the open problems those papers claim to settle.
Why it matters
It is one of the first quantitative measures of how fast AI entered research mathematics in 2026: roughly a tenfold rise in substantive use within one semester. It also shows that most AI-resolved “open problems” are lesser-known conjectures, not headline ones.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 primary
Primary
- arXiv 2608.24961: The Gold Rush in AI4Math: Where Are We Now?arxiv.org, paper
Changes
- Linked the July–September catalogue entry
- Filed