erdosproblems.com freezes proof claims and drops ‘open/solved’ labels and solver credits after a wave of unexplained AI proofs
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 8 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra159 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.598 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash189 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7128 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 98 days before it.
Key facts
- Changes: problem comments and proof claims frozen (proofs now go by email for manual review); general discussion stays open
- All problems shown in a neutral colour with no open/solved designation, to remove the ‘OPEN->SOLVED dopamine hit’
- No more credit-giving language for results, human or AI; remarks point to sources that discuss the proofs instead
- Priority on good expositions of proofs, ‘whether these proofs are old or new, human or AI’
- Bloom: ‘There has been a wave of AI-produced solutions provided with no explanation’, displacing people interested in the mathematics
- Effect on tracking: the site’s solved labels had been the scoreboard used to count AI-solved Erdős problems since 2025
What happened
Bloom’s post, written for the site’s forum and cross-posted as a guest post on Tao’s “What’s new” blog, says the large pool of easy-to-state Erdős problems “provided the ideal showcase for AI”, and that unexplained AI-generated solutions were turning the site into a proof repository. He quotes the view that for Erdős “mathematics was a very human activity, best done out loud”, and says the site will resist a future in which formal proofs are posted only to be read by other AIs. The changes were announced as already in effect.
Why it matters
erdosproblems.com was where AI-for-math claims were counted and disputed, from the GPT-5 controversy of October 2025 to the 2026 waves of GPT-6 Astra and Claude results. Without status labels and credits, counts like “N Erdős problems solved by AI” lose their main public source. The move came the same day OpenAI released 722 math manuscripts and adds to the math community’s pushback (Association for Human Mathematics).
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
- Thomas Bloom: Changes to the Erdős problems web site (erdosproblems.com forum)erdosproblems.com, official
- Cross-post on Terence Tao’s blog (Oct 6, 2026)terrytao.wordpress.com, official
Changes
- Filed