42 mathematician Fellows of the Royal Society
Including Gowers, Hairer, Maynard and Scholze, call AI an ‘emergency’ in open letter to Paul Nurse
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
On 16 Sep 2026 42 mathematical Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society sent an open letter to its President, Sir Paul Nurse, expressing “extreme concern about the pace of development of AI”.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra139 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.578 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen169 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7108 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 78 days before it.
Key facts
- Signatories (42) include Timothy Gowers, Martin Hairer, James Maynard, Peter Scholze, Claire Voisin, Wendelin Werner, Ingrid Daubechies, Marcus du Sautoy, Ben Green, Peter Sarnak, Kevin Costello, Richard Thomas
- Signatories state that none has ‘any significant involvement with AI companies’; footnotes admit free model access and informal links
- Cites former lab employees’ estimates of extinction risk ‘as high as 10 percent over the next decade’ and says these ‘must not be dismissed as hype’
- Footnote: remarks apply to publicly available models ‘such as ChatGPT6-Astra’, since the Navier–Stokes methodology is not fully known
- Opened to all mathematicians for co-signing; 464 additional signatories on the public copy by 2026-09-29
- Posted on Tao’s blog as a guest post by Ben Green; Tao supports it but did not sign, citing his collaborations with AI industry partners
What happened
A week after the Navier–Stokes claim, many of Britain’s most eminent mathematicians turned from arguing about credit to warning about catastrophic risk. The letter says their first-hand view of AI’s rise in their own field convinced them that extinction-risk warnings are credible. It asks the Royal Society to use its influence with government and the media before the danger “becomes obvious to the wider public”, when “it may be too late to act”.
Why it matters
It is one of the first collective x-risk statements from a scientific field that says it was persuaded by AI’s performance in that field. The signatories include several Fields Medallists (Gowers, Hairer, Maynard, Scholze, Werner) who are not part of the AI-safety community.
Sources
3 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 3 primary
Primary
- Terence Tao’s blog: Open letter from Fellows of the Royal Society on AI existential risk (guest post, Ben Green)terrytao.wordpress.com, official
- Letter text with the 42 FRS signatories (Google Doc)docs.google.com, official
- Public co-signing copy ‘Mathematicians concerned about the pace of development of AI’ (Google Doc)docs.google.com, official
Changes
- Filed. Letter text read from the Google Docs linked on Tao’s blog